A TRAGIC IDYL

BY

PAUL BOURGET

AUTHOR OF "OUTRE-MER," ETC.

LONDON

DOWNEY AND CO. LTD.

12, YORK STREET, COVENT GARDEN

1896

CONTENTS

CHAPTER
[I. Le "Tout Europe"]
[II. The Cry of a Soul]
[III. A Scruple]
[IV. Lovers' Resolutions]
[V. Afloat]
[VI. Il Matrimonio Segreto]
[VII. Olivier du Prat]
[VIII. Friend and Mistress]
[IX. Friend and Mistress—continued]
[X. A Vow]
[XI. Between Two Tragedies]
[XII. The Dénouement]

A TRAGIC IDYL

CHAPTER I
LE "TOUT EUROPE"

That night (toward the end of February, 188—) a vast crowd was thronging the halls of the Casino at Monte Carlo. It was one of the momentary occasions, well known to all who have passed the winter season on the Corniche, when a sudden and prodigious afflux of composite humanity transfigures that place, ordinarily so vulgar with the brutal luxury of the people whom it satisfies. The gay madness that breaks out at Nice during the Carnival attracts to this little point of the Riviera the moving army of pleasure hunters and adventurers, while the beauty of the climate allures thousands of invalids and people weary of living, the victims of disease and of ill fortune; and on certain nights, like that on which this narrative begins, when the countless representatives of the various classes, scattered ordinarily along the coast, suddenly rush together into the gaming-house, their fantastic variety of character appears in all its startling incongruities, with the aspect of a cosmopolitan pandemonium, dazzling and sinister, deafening and tragical, ridiculous and painful, strewn with all the wrecks of luxury and vice of every country and of every class, the victims of every misfortune and disaster. In this stifling atmosphere, amid the glitter of insolent and ignoble wealth, the ancient monarchies were represented by three princes of the house of Bourbon, and the modern by two grand-nephews of Bonaparte, all five recognizable by their profiles, which were reproduced on hundreds of the gold and silver coins rolling before them on the green tables.

Neither these princes nor their neighbors noticed the presence at one of the tables of a man who had borne the title of King in one of the states improvised on the Balkan Peninsula. Men had fought for this man, men had died for him, but his royal interests seemed now to be restricted to the pasteboard monarchs on the table of trente-et-quarante. And king and princes, grand-nephews and cousins of emperors, in the promiscuity of this international resort, elbowed noblemen whose ancestors had served or betrayed their own; and these lords elbowed the sons of tradesmen, dressed like them, nourished like them, amused like them; and these bourgeois brushed against celebrated artists—here the most famous of our portrait painters, there a well-known singer, there an illustrious writer—while fashionable women mingled with this crowd in toilets which rivalled in splendor those of the demi-monde. And other men poured in continually, and other women, and especially others of the demi-monde. Through the door they streamed in endlessly, of all categories, from the creature with hungry eyes and the face of a criminal, in search of some fortunate gambler whose substance she might absorb as a spider does that of a fly, to the insolent and triumphant devourer of fortunes, who stakes twenty-five louis on every turn of the roulette and wears in her ears diamonds worth 30,000f. These contrasts formed here and there a picture even more striking and significant; for example, between two of these venders of love, their complexion painted with ceruse and with rouge, their eyes depraved by luxury and greed, a young woman, almost a child, recently married and passing through Monte Carlo on her wedding journey, stretched forth her fresh, pretty face with a smile of innocence and roguish curiosity.

Further on, the amateurs of political philosophy might have seen one of the great Israelitish bankers of Paris placing his stake beside that of the bitterest of socialist pamphleteers. Not far from them a young consumptive, whose white face spotted with purple, hollow cheeks, burning eyes, and fleshless hands announced the fast approach of death, was seated beside a "sporting" man, whose ruddy complexion, broad shoulders, and herculean muscles seemed to promise eighty years of life. The white glare of the electric globes along the ceiling and the walls, and the yellow light that radiated from the lamps suspended above the tables, falling upon the faces of this swarming crowd revealed differences no less extraordinary of race and origin. Russian faces, broad and heavy, powerfully, almost savagely Asiatic, were mingled with Italian physiognomies, of a Latin fineness and of a modelling that recalled the elegance of ancient portraits. German heads, thick, and, as it were, rough-hewn, with an expression of mingled cunning and good nature, alternated with Parisian heads, intelligent and dissipated, which suggested the boulevard and the couloirs of the Variétés. Red and energetic profiles of Englishmen and Americans sketched their vigorous outlines, evincing the habit of exercise, long exposure to the tanning air and also the daily intoxication of alcohol; while exotic faces, by the animation of their eyes and mouths, by the warm tones of their complexions, evoked visions of other climes, of far-off countries, of fortunes made in the antipodes, in those mysterious regions which our fathers called simply the isles. And money, money, endless money flowed from this crowd on to the green tables, whose number had been increased since the previous day. Although the hands of the great clock over the entrance marked a quarter to ten, the visitors became at every moment more numerous. It was not the sound of conversation that was audible in these rooms, but the noise of footsteps moving about the tables, which stood firm amid this surging crowd like flat rocks on the mounting sea, motionless under the lash of the waves. The noise of footsteps was accompanied by another no less continuous—the clinking of gold and silver coins, which one could hear falling, piling, separating, living, in fact, with the sonorous and rapid life which they have under the rake of the croupier. The rattle of the balls in the roulette rooms formed a mechanical accompaniment to the formulae, mechanically repeated, in which the words "rouge" and "noir," "pair" and "impair," "passe" and "manque" recurred with oracular impassibility. And, still more monotonous, from the tables of trente-et-quarante which lacked the rattle of the wheel, other formulæ arose incessantly—"Quatre, deux. Rouge gagne et la couleur—Cinq, neuf. Rouge perd, la couleur gagne—Deux, deux. Après—" At the sight of the columns of napoleons and hundred-franc pieces rising and falling on the ten or twelve tables, the bank-notes of one hundred, five hundred, and a thousand francs, unfolded and heaped up; the full dress of the men, the jewels of the women, the evident prodigality of all these people, one felt the gaming-house vibrating with a frenzy other than that of loss and gain. One breathed in the fever of luxury, the excess and abuse of pleasure. On nights like this gold seems to have no longer any value, so fast is it won and lost on these tables, so wildly is it spent in the hotels, restaurants, and villas which crowd around the Casino like the houses of a watering-place around the spring. The beauty of women is here too tempting and accessible, pleasure is too abundant, the climate too soft, comfort is too easy. The paradise of brutal refinement installed here on this flower-clad rock is hostile to calm enjoyment and to cool reflection. The giddiness which it imparts to the passing guest has its crisis of intensity, and this night was one of them. It had something of the Kermess about it, and of Babylonian furore. Nor did it lack even the Mene, Tekel, Upharsin of the Biblical feast, for the despatches posted on one of the columns in the vestibule recounted the bloody episode of a strike that had broken out since the previous day in the mining district of the North. The telegram told of the firing of the troops, of workmen killed, and of an engineer murdered for revenge. But who pictured in concrete images the details of this tragic despatch? Who in this crowd, more and more athirst for pleasure, realized its revolutionary menace? The gold and silver coins continued to roll, the bank-notes to unfold and quiver, the croupiers to cry "Faites vos jeux" and "Rien ne va plus," the balls to spin around the wheels, the cards to fall on the green cloth, the rakes to grasp the money of the poor unfortunates, and each one to follow his mania for gambling or for luxury, his fancy for snobbery and vanity, or the caprice of his ennui. For how many different fancies this strange palace, with its doors like those of the Alhambra, served as the theatre. On this night of feverish excitement it was lending one of its divans to the preparatives for a most fantastic adventure, the mere announcement of which recalls the advertisements of the Opéra Comique, the music of our great-grandmothers, and the forgotten name of Cimarosa—a secret marriage.

The group of three persons who had been compelled to choose a corner of this mundane caravansary for that romantic conspiracy was composed of a young man and two women. The young man appeared to be thirty-two years old. That was also the age of one of the women, who was, as they say in America, the chaperon of the other, a girl ten years younger. To complete the paradoxical character of this matrimonial conference in the long room that separates the roulette halls from those of the trente-et-quarante, it is only necessary to add that the young girl, an American, was in reality chaperoning the official chaperon, and that the project of this secret marriage did not concern her in the least. She was seated at the end of the divan, unmistakably a sentinel, while her friend and the young man talked together. Her beautiful brown eyes fearlessly scrutinized the passing crowd with the energy and confidence natural to a girl of the United States, accustomed from her childhood to realize her individuality, and who, if she dispenses with certain conventionalities, at least knows why, and is not ashamed of it. She was beautiful, with that beauty already so ripe which, accentuated by a toilet almost too fashionable, gives to so many American women the air of a creature on exhibition. Her features were delicate, even too small for the powerful moulding of her face and the strength of her chin. On her thick, chestnut-colored hair she wore a round hat of black velvet, with a rim too wide and with plumes too high, which rose in the back over a cachepeigne of artificial orchids. It was the hat of a young girl and a hat for the afternoon, but, in its excess, it was quite in keeping with her dress of glossy cloth and her corsage, or rather cuirass, trimmed with silver, which the most celebrated couturier in Paris had designed for her. Thus adorned, and with the superabundance of jewellery that accompanied this toilet, Miss Florence Marsh—that was her name—might have passed for anything in the world except what she really was—the most straightforward and honest of young girls, helping to prepare for the conjugal happiness of a woman equally honest and irreproachable. This woman was the Marquise Andryana Bonnacorsi, a Venetian by birth, belonging to the ancient and illustrious dogal family of the Navagero. Her dress, though it, too, came from Paris, bore the marks of that taste for tinsel peculiar to Italian finery, which gives it that fufu air, to employ an untranslatable term, with which our provincial bourgeoisie ridicules these unsubstantial ornaments. A flock of butterflies in black jet rested upon her black satin dress. The same butterflies appeared on the satin of her small shoes and among the pink roses of her hat, above her beautiful light hair of that red gold so dear to the painters of her country. The voluptuous splendor of her complexion, the nobility of her somewhat heavy features, the precocious development of her bust accorded well with her origin, and even more the soft blue of her eyes, in which there floated all the passion and languor of the lagoons. The light of her blue eyes enveloped the young man who was now speaking to her, and with whom she was visibly in love, madly in love. He, in the full maturity of his strength, justified that adoration more sensual than sentimental. He was a remarkable type of the manly beauty peculiar to our Provence, which attests that for centuries it was the land where the Roman race left its deepest imprint. His short, black hair, over the straight, white forehead; his pointed, slightly curling beard, the firm line if his nose, and the deep curve of his brows, gave him a profile like that of a medal, which would have been severe, if all the energy of a born lover had not burned in his soft eyes, and all the gayety of the South sparkled in his smile. His robust and supple physique could be divined even under his coat and white waistcoat, and these signs of animal health were so evident, his somewhat excessive gestures seemed to evince such exuberance, such perfect joy in living, that one failed to notice how impenetrable were those ardent eyes, how shrewd the smiling mouth, and how all the signs of cunning calculation were imprinted on that face, so reflective under its mobility.

Two kinds of men thus excel in utilizing their defects to the profit of their interest—the German, who shelters his diplomacy behind his apparent dulness, and the Provençal, who conceals his beneath his instinctive petulance, and who appears, as he really is on the surface, an enthusiast, while he is executing some plan as solidly and coldly realistic as though he were a Scotchman of the Border. Who would have guessed that on this lounge of the Casino, while he talked so gayly with his habitual abandon, the Viscount de Corancez—he belonged to a family near Tarascon, of the least authentic title to nobility—was just bringing to a successful conclusion the most audacious, the most improbable, and the most carefully studied of intrigues? But who in all the world suspected the real character of this "careless Marius," as he was called by his father, the old vine-grower of Tarascon, whom his compatriots had seen die in despair at the eternal debts of his son? Certainly not these men of Tarascon and the Rhone valley, who had seen the beautiful vines, so well cared for and regenerated by the father, disappear, vineyard by vineyard, to satisfy the follies of the heir at Paris. Nor was his real character known to the companions of his folly, the Casal, the Vardes, the Machault, all be noted men of pleasure of the time, who had clearly recognized the sensuality and vanity of the Southerner, but not his cunning, and who had classed him once ad for all among the provincials destined to disappear after shining like a meteor in the firmament of Paris. No one had perceived in this joyous companion, this gourmand ready for every pleasure, for a supper, for cards, for a love-affair, the practical philosopher who should when the hour arrived nimbly change his weapon. And the hour had struck several months ago; of the 600,000f. left him by his father scarcely 40,000 remained, and this winter the supple Southerner had begun to execute the programme of is thirty-second year—a successful marriage. The originality of this project lay in the peculiar conditions he affixed to it. In the first place, he had perceived that, even if enriched by the most fortunate marriage, his situation at Paris would never be what he wished. His defeat at an aristocratic club, to which he had attempted to gain admittance, trusting of certain influence imprudently offered and accepted, had shown him the difference between mere comradeship and a solid standing in society. Two or three visits to Nice had revealed the cosmopolitan world to him, and, with his superior cleverness, he had divined its resources. He had resolved to marry some stranger who had a good standing in the society of Europe. He dreamed of passing the winter on the coast, the summer in the Alps, the hunting season in Scotland, the autumn on his wife's estate, and a few festive weeks in Paris in the spring. This plan of existence presupposed that his wife should not be a mere young girl. Corancez wished her to be a widow, older than himself if need be, and yet still beautiful in her autumn. As he based his hopes of success mainly upon his youthful and handsome appearance, it was desirable that the matrimonial labors should not be too severe. An Italian Marquise, belonging by birth to the highest Venetian aristocracy, the widow of a nobleman, left with an income of 200,000f., irreproachable in character, and devotedly religious, which would save her from any love-affairs unsanctioned by marriage, and nevertheless led by the influence of her Anglomaniac brother into cosmopolitan life, was the ideal of all his hopes, embodied as though by enchantment. But all the apples of Hesperides have their dragon, and the mythical monster was in this case represented by the brother, the Count Alvise Navagero, a doubtful personage under his snobbish exterior, who well understood how to keep for his own use the millions of his deceased brother-in-law, Francesco Bonnacorsi. How had the Provençal trickery eluded the Venetian watchfulness? Even to this day, when those events are things of the past, the five o'clock habitués of the yacht club at Cannes confess themselves unable to explain it, such astuteness had the ingenious Corancez employed in preparing the mine without arousing a suspicion of his subterranean labor. And four short months had sufficed. Through an inner conflict of emotions and of scruples, of timidity and passion, the Marquise Andryana had been brought to accept the idea of a secret marriage, finding no other way to satisfy the ardor with which she now burned, the exigencies of her religion, and her fear of her brother, which grew with her love for Corancez. She trembled now at the thought of it, although she knew this redoubtable guardian to be engaged in risking at a near table the thousand-franc notes she had given to be rid of him. Alvise was staking his money with the thoughtfulness and care of an old gambler who had already been once ruined by cards, unaware that within a few yards of him another game that concerned him was being played, and a fortune was at stake which he, like a perfect parasite, considered as his own. It was not simply at stake, it was lost; for the romantic plan invented by Corancez to fasten an inseparable bond between the Marquise and himself was about to be consummated; the two lovers had just settled upon the place and time and details.

"And now," concluded Marius, "rien ne va plus, as they say in roulette. We have only to wait patiently for two weeks.—I believe we have not forgotten anything."

"But I am so afraid of some mischance," said the Marquise Andryana, softly shaking her blond head, the black butterflies trembling on her hat. "If Marsh changes the date of his yachting party?"

"You will telegraph me," said Corancez, "and I will meet you at Genoa another day.—Anyhow, Marsh will not change the date. It was the Baroness Ely who chose the 14th, and the wife of an archduke, though morganatic, is not to be disappointed, even were Marsh such a democrat as the western ranchman, who said once, with a strong handshake to an Infanta of Spain, 'Very glad to meet you, Infanta.' It was Marsh himself who told me this, and you remember his disgust, don't you, Miss Florence?"

"My uncle is as punctual in his pleasures as in his business," replied the American girl; "and since the Baroness Ely is in the party—"

"But if Alvise changes his mind and sails with us?" said the Venetian.

"Ah, Marquise, Marquise," Corancez cried, "what dismal forebodings. You forget that the Count Alvise is invited to the Dalilah, the yacht of Lord Herbert Bohun, to meet H.K.H. Alberto Edoardo, Prince of Wales, and Navagero miss that appointment? Never."

In light mockery at his future brother-in-law's Anglomania, he imitated the British accent which the Count affected, with a mimicry so gay that the Marquise could not help exclaiming:—

"Che carino!"

And with her fan she stroked the hand of her fiancé. Notwithstanding his pleasantry at the expense of the domestic tyrant, at which the Marquise was ready to smile, much as she trembled in his presence, Corancez seemed to think the conversation dangerous, for he attempted to bring it to an end:—

"I do not wish my happiness to cost you a moment of worry, and it will not. I can predict hour by hour everything that will take place on the 14th, and you will see if your friend is not a prophet. You know what a lucky line I have here," he added, showing the palm of his hand, "and you know what I have read in your own pretty hand."

It was one of his tricks, and at the same time one of his own superstitions, to play the rôle of a parlor wizard and chiromancer, and he continued with that tone of certitude that imparts firmness to the irresolute:—

"You will have a magnificent passage to Genoa. You will find me you know where with Dom Fortunato Lagumina, for the old abbé is eager to act as chaplain in this matrimonio segreto. You will return to Cannes without any one in the world suspecting that Mme. la Marquise Bonnacorsi has become Mme. la Vicomtesse de Corancez, excepting the Vicomte, who will find some way of making our little combinazione acceptable to the good Alvise. Until then you will write to me at Genoa, poste restante, and I to you, in care of our dear Miss Florence."

"Whose name is also Miss Prudence," said the young girl, "and she thinks you are talking too long for conspirators. Beware of pickpockets," she added in English.

This was the signal agreed upon to warn them of the approach of some acquaintance.

"Bah, that pickpocket is not dangerous," said Corancez, following the direction of Miss Marsh's fan, and recognizing the person who had attracted her attention. "It is Pierre Hautefeuille, my old friend. He doesn't even notice us. Marquise, do you wish to see a lover desperate at not finding his loved one? And to think that I should be like him," he added, in a lower tone, "if you were not here to intoxicate me with your beauty." Then, raising his voice, "Watch him sit down on that lounge in the corner, unconscious of the three pairs of eyes that are observing him. A ruined gambler might blow out his brains beside him and he would not turn his head. He would not even hear."

The young man had at this moment an air of absorption so profound, so complete, that he justified the laughing raillery of Corancez. If the plot of a secret marriage, mapped out in these surroundings and amid this crowd, appear strangely paradoxical, the reveries of this man whom Corancez had called his "old friend"—they had been at school together in Paris for two years—were still stranger and more paradoxical. The contrast was too strong between the crowd swarming around Pierre Hautefeuille and the hypnotism that appeared to be upon him. Evidently the two thousand people scattered through these rooms ceased to exist for him as soon as he had discovered the absence of a certain person. And who could this be if not a woman? The disappointed lover had fallen, rather than seated himself, upon the lounge in front of Corancez and his fellow-conspirators. With his elbow on the arm of the divan, he pressed his hand over his forehead, disconsolately. His slender fingers, pushing back his hair, disclosed the noble outline of his brow, revealed his profile, the slightly arched nose, the severe lips, whose proud expression would have been almost fierce were it not for the tender softness of his eyes. This look of strangely intense meditation in a face so exhausted and pale, with its small, dark mustache, gave him a resemblance to the classic portrait of Louis XIII. in his youth. His narrow shoulders, his slightly angular limbs, the evident delicacy of his whole body indicated one of those fragile organizations whose force lies wholly in the nerves, a physique with no vital power of resistance, ravaged eternally by emotions, down to the obscure and quivering centre of consciousness, and as easily exhausted by sentiment as muscular natures are by action and sensation. Although Pierre Hautefeuille was, in his dress and manner, indistinguishable from Corancez and the countless men of pleasure in the rooms, yet either his physiognomy was very deceptive or he did not belong to the same race morally as these cavaliers of the white waistcoat and the varnished pumps, who encircled the ladies dressed like demi-mondaines, and the demi-mondaines dressed like ladies, or crowded around the tables, amid the throng of gentlemen and swindlers. The melancholy in the curve of his lips and in his tired eyelids revealed a sadness, not momentary, but habitual, an abiding gloom, and if it were true that he had come to this place in search of a woman whom he loved, this sadness was too naturally explained. He must suffer from the life that this woman was leading, from her surroundings, her pleasures, her habits, her inconsistencies—suffer even to the extent of illness, and, perhaps, without knowing why, for he had not the eyes that judge of one they love. In any case, if he was, as Corancez said, a lover, he was certainly not a successful one. His face showed neither the pride nor the bitterness of a man to whom the loved woman has given herself, and who believes in her or suspects her. Even the simplicity with which he indulged his reveries in the midst of this crowd and on the lounge of a gaming-house was enough to prove a youthfulness of heart and imagination rare at his age. Corancez's companions were struck at the same time with this naïve contrast, and each made to herself a little exclamation in her native tongue:—

"Com'è simpatico," murmured the Italian.

"Oh, you dear boy," said Miss Florence.

"And with whom is he in love?" they asked together.

"I could give you a hundred to guess," said Corancez, "but you could not. Never mind. It is not a secret that was confided to me; I discovered it myself, so I am not bound to keep it. Well, the sympathetic, dear boy has chosen to fall in love with our friend Madame de Carlsberg, the Baroness Ely, herself. She has been here for six days with Madame Brion, and this poor boy has not been able to remain away from her. He wished to see her without her knowing. He must have been wandering around the Villa Brion, waiting for her to come out. See the dust on his shoes and trousers. Then, having doubtless heard that the Baroness spends her evenings here, he has come to watch her. He has not found her in this crowd. That is how we love," he added, with a look at the Marquise, "when we do love."

"And the Baroness?"

"You wish to know whether or not the Baroness loves him? Luckily you and Miss Florence believe in hands, for it is only through my talent for fortunetelling that I can answer you. You are interested? Well," he continued, with his peculiar air of seriousness and mystification, "she has in her hand a red heart-line, which indicates a violent passion, and there is a mark that places this passion near her thirtieth year, which is just her present age. By the way, did I never tell you that she has also on the Mount of Jupiter, there, a perfect star—one of whose rays forms a cross of union?"

"And that means?" inquired the American girl, with the interest that the people of the most materialistic country have for all questions of a supernatural order, for everything that pertains to what they call "spiritualism."

"Marriage with a prince," replied the Southerner.

There was a minute of silence, during which Corancez continued to watch Pierre Hautefeuille with great attention. Suddenly his eyes sparkled with an idea that had just occurred to him:—

"Marquise. The witness we need for the ceremony at Genoa. Why not have him? I think he would bring us good luck."

"That is so," said Madame Bonnacorsi; "it is delightful to meet with a face like that at certain moments of one's life. But would it be wise?"

"If I propose him to you," Corancez replied, "you may be sure that I answer for his discretion. We have known each other since our boyhood, Hautefeuille and I; he is solid gold. And how much safer than a hired witness, who could at any time betray us."

"Will he accept?"

"I shall know to-morrow before leaving Cannes, if you have no objection to my choosing him. Only," the young man added, "in that case it might be better to have him on the yacht."

"I'll attend to that," said Miss Marsh. "But how and when introduce him to my uncle?"

"This evening," Corancez replied, "while we are all in the train for Cannes. I will secure our lover at once, and not leave him till we are in the train—especially," he added, rising, "as we have been talking here too long, and though the walls have no ears, they have eyes. My dear," he murmured, passionately pressing the little hand of Madame Bonnacorsi, who also had risen, "I shall not talk with you again before the great day; give me a word to carry with me and live with until then."

"God guard you, anima mia," she answered, in her grave voice, revealing all the passion that this skilful personage had inspired in her.

"It is written here," he said gayly, opening his hand, "and here," he added, placing his hand upon his heart.

Then, turning to the young girl:—

"Miss Flossie, when you need some one to go through fire for you, a word, and he will be ready right away."

While Miss Marsh laughed at this joke upon one of the little idioms of the Yankee language, the Marquise followed him with the look of a passionate woman whose heart goes out to every motion of the man she loves. The Provençal moved toward his old friend with such grace and suppleness of carriage that the American girl could not refrain from remarking it. The young girls of that energetic race, so fond of exercise and so accustomed to the easy familiarities of the tennis court, are frankly and innocently sensible to the physical beauty of men.

"How handsome he is, your Corancez," she exclaimed to the Marquise. "To me he is the Frenchman, the type that I used to picture to myself in Marionville when I read the novels of Dumas. How happy you will be with him."

"So happy," the Italian murmured, but added, with a melancholy foreboding, "yet God will not permit it."

"God permits everything that one wishes, if one wishes it hard enough, and it is just," Miss Florence interrupted.

"No. I have had to tell Alvise too many lies. I shall be punished."

"If you feel that way," said the American, "why don't you tell your brother? Do you wish me to do it? Five minutes of conversation, and you will not have a single lie on your conscience. You have the right to marry. The money is yours. What do you fear?"

"You don't know Alvise," she said, and her face had a look of actual terror. "What if he should provoke him to a duel and kill him? No; let us do as we have planned, and may the Madonna protect us."

She closed her eyes a moment, sighing. Florence Marsh watched her with amazement. The independent Anglo-Saxon could never understand the hypnotic terror that Navagero threw over his sister. The thoughts of the Marquise had wandered back to Cannes. She saw the little chapel of Notre Dame des Pins, where every day for months a mass had been said in order to find pardon for her falsehoods, and she saw the altar where she and Corancez had knelt and made a vow that they would go together to Loretto as soon as their marriage was announced. The Provençal believed in the Madonna, just as he believed in the lines of the hand, with that demi-scepticism and demi-faith possible only to those southern natures, so childish and so cunning, so complex with their instinctive simplicity, so sincere in their boastfulness, and forever superstitious in even their coldest calculations. He saw in the scruples of Madame Bonnacorsi the surest guarantee of his success; for, once in love, a woman of such religious ardor and such passionate intensity would end necessarily in marriage. And, besides, the tapers burning in the little church at Cannes assured him in regard to the brother, whose suspicions he had evaded, but whom he knew to be capable of anything in order not to lose the fortune of his sister. So, unlike Miss Marsh, he was not astonished at the fears of his fiancée. But what could the fury of Alvise avail against a union consummated in due form before a genuine priest, lacking only the civil consecration, which mattered nothing to the pious Marquise? However, faithful to the old adage that two precautions are better than one, Corancez, in view of the eventual explanation, was not displeased at the prospect of having at his wedding a man of his own set. Why had he not thought before of his old friend of Louis-le-Grand, whom he had found again at Cannes, just as candid and simple-hearted as in the days when they sat side by side on the benches of the school? Corancez had recognized the candor and simplicity of his old acquaintance at the first touch of his hand. He had recognized them also in the innocent impulsiveness with which Hautefeuille had become enamoured of the Baroness Ely de Carlsberg. He had revealed this passion to his two interlocutors; but he had not told them that he believed Madame de Carlsberg to be as much in love with the young man as he was with her. However, he might justly have boasted of his perspicacity. It had been keen in this case, as in so many others. But, perspicacious as he was, the Southerner did not realize that in making use of his discovery he was about to turn the opéra bouffe of his marriage with Madame Bonnacorsi into a dramatic episode. In speaking to himself of his famous line of luck, he always said, "Only gay things come to me." It seems, in fact, that there are two distinct types of men, and their eternal coexistence proves the legitimacy of the two standpoints taken since the world began by the painters of human nature—comedy and tragedy. Every man partakes of one or the other, and rare is the destiny in which both are mingled. For a whole group of persons—of whom Corancez was one—the most romantic affairs end in a vaudeville; while for the other class, to which, alas, Pierre Hautefeuille belonged, the simplest adventures result in tragedy. If the first love sincerely, never does the loved woman do them wrong. A smile is always ready to mingle with their tears. The others are given to poignant emotions, to cruel complications; all their idyls are tragic idyls. And truly, to see these two young men side by side, as Corancez laid his hand on Hautefeuille's shoulder, to arouse him from his reverie, these two eternal types—the hero of comedy and the hero of tragedy—appeared in all their contrast—the one robust and laughing, with bright eyes and sensual lips, sure of himself, and throwing around him, as it were, an atmosphere of good humor; the other frail and delicate, his eyes heavy with thought, ready to suffer at the least contact with life, scarcely able to conceal a quiver of irritation at the sudden interrupting of his dreams.

His irritation quickly vanished; when he had risen and Corancez had taken him familiarly by the arm, the thought occurred to him that perhaps he might hear from his old friend some news of the Baroness Ely de Carlsberg, whom in fact he had been vainly seeking at Monte Carlo. And the cunning Southerner began:—

"How sly of you to come here without letting me know. And how foolish. You might have dined comfortably with me. I had this evening the prettiest table in Monte Carlo: Madame de Carlsberg, Madame de Chésy, Miss Marsh, Madame Bonnacorsi. You know all four of them, I believe. You would not have been bored."

"I didn't know until five o'clock that I should take the train at six," said Hautefeuille.

"I understand," said Corancez; "you are sitting comfortably in your room at Cannes. You hear voices, like Jeanne d'Arc, only not quite the same; 'Rien ne va plus. Messieurs, faites vos jeux;' and the bank-notes begin to pant in your purse, the napoleons to dance in your pocket, and before you know it you find yourself in front of the green cloth. Have you won?"

"I never play," Pierre answered.

"You will before long. But, tell me, do you often come here?"

"This is the first time."

"And you have been all winter at Cannes. I can still hear Du Prat calling you Mademoiselle Pierrette. You are too good and too young. Look out for the reaction. And, speaking of Du Prat, have you heard from him?"

"He is still on the Nile with his wife," Hautefeuille replied, "and he insists upon my joining them."

"And you wouldn't go and finish the wedding journey with them. That was even wiser than refusing to play. That is the result of not spending one's honeymoon here on the coast, like everybody else. They get bored with each other even before the housewarming."

"But I assure you that Olivier is very happy," Hautefeuille said, with an emphasis that showed his affection for the man of whom Corancez had spoken so lightly; then, to avoid any further comments upon his absent friend: "But, frankly, do you find this society so amusing?" And he motioned toward the crowd of players around the tables who were growing more and more excited. "It is the paradise of the rastaquouères."

"That's the prejudice of the Parisian," said the Provençal, who still felt bitter against the great city on account of his defeat at the most desirable of clubs. He continued to vent his bitterness; "Rastaquouères. When you have uttered that anathema, you think that you have settled the question; and by dint of repeating it, you blind yourself to the fact that you Parisians are becoming the provincials of Europe. Yes, you no longer produce the really great aristocrats; they are now the English, the Russians, the Americans, the Italians, who have as much elegance and wit as you Parisians, but with real temperament beneath their elegance which you have never had, and with the gayety which you have no more. And the women of these foreign lands. Contrast them with that heartless, senseless doll, that vanity in papier mâché, the Parisian woman."

"In the first place, I am not at all a Parisian," interrupted Pierre Hautefeuille; "I am rather a provincial of provincials. And then, I grant the second part of your paradox; some of these women are remarkable in their fineness and culture, in their brightness and charm. And yet is their charm ever equal, not to that of the Parisienne, I agree, but to that of the real Frenchwoman, with her good sense and her grace, her tact, her intelligence—the poetry of perfect measure and taste?"

He had been thinking aloud, unconscious of the slight smile that passed, almost invisibly, over the ironical lips of his interlocutor. The "Sire" de Corancez was not the man to engage himself in a discussion for which he cared no more than he did for the Pharaohs whose tombs served as the background of their friend's honeymoon. Knowing Hautefeuille's attachment to this man, he had brought up his name in order to give to their conversation an accent of ease and confidence. Hautefeuille's remarks about foreign women, confirming the diagnosis of his love for Madame de Carlsberg, recalled Corancez to the real purpose of this interview. He and his companion were at this moment near the table of trente-et-quarante, at which was seated one of the persons most involved in the execution of his project, the uncle of Miss Marsh, one of the most celebrated of American railroad magnates, Richard Carlyle Marsh, familiarly known as Dickie Marsh, he who was destined, on a fixed day, to lend his yacht unwittingly to the wedding voyage of Madame Bonnacorsi. It was in his company that Corancez was to return with his friend to Cannes, and he wished to interest Hautefeuille in the Yankee potentate in order to facilitate his introduction.

"No," he continued, "I assure you that this foreign colony contains men who are as interesting as their wives. We are apt to overlook this fact, because they are not so pretty to look at.—I see one at this table whom I shall introduce. We met his niece the other day at the Baroness's. He is Marsh, the American. I wish you to see him playing— Good, some one is rising. Don't lose me, we may profit by this and get to the front of the crowd."

And the adroit Southerner managed to push himself and Hautefeuille through the sudden opening of the spectators so that in a moment they were stationed right behind the chair of the croupier, who was in the act of turning the cards. They could command the whole table and every movement of the players.

"Now, look," Corancez whispered. "There is Marsh."

"That little gray-faced man with the pile of bank-notes in front of him?"

"That's the man. He is not fifty years old, and he is worth ten million dollars. At eighteen he was a conductor of a tramway at Cleveland, Ohio. Such as you see him now, he has founded a city of fifty thousand inhabitants, named after his wife, Marionville, and he has made his fortune literally with his own hands, since they say that he himself, with a few workmen, built on the prairie the first miles of his company's railroad, which is now more than two thousand miles long. Observe those hands of his. You can see them so well against the green cloth; they are strong and not common. You see the knotty knuckles, which means reflection, judgment, calculation. The ends of the fingers are a little too spatulated; that means an excessive activity, the need of continual movement and a tendency toward mournful thoughts. I will tell you some day about the death of his daughter. You see the thumb; the two joints are large and of equal length; that means will and logic combined. It curves backward; that is prodigality. Marsh has given a hundred thousand dollars to the University of Marionville. And notice his movements, what decision, what calm, what freedom from nervousness. Isn't that a man?"

"He is certainly a man with an abundance of money," said Hautefeuille, amused by his friend's enthusiasm, "and a man who is not afraid of losing it."

"And that other, two places from Marsh, has he no money, then? That personage with a rosette and a red, sinister face. It is Brion, the financier, the director of the Banque Générale. Have you not met him at the house of Madame de Carlsberg? His wife is the intimate friend of Baroness Ely. Millionaire that he is, look at his hands, how nervous and greedy. You observe that his thumb is ball-shaped; that is the mark of crime. If that rascal is not a robber! And his manner of clutching the bank-notes, doesn't it show his brutality? And beside him you may see the play of a fool, Chésy, with his smooth and pointed fingers, the two middle ones of equal length, that of Saturn and that of the Sun. That is the infallible sign of a player who will ruin himself, especially if he is no more logical than this one. And he thinks himself shrewd! He enters into business relations with Brion, who pays court to Madame de Chésy. You may see the inevitable end."

"The pretty Madame de Chésy?" exclaimed Hautefeuille, "and that abominable Brion? Impossible."

"I do not say that it has happened; I say that, given this imbecile of a husband, with his taste for gambling here and at the Bourse, there is a great danger that it will happen some day. You see," he added, "that this place is not so commonplace when you open your eyes; and you will acknowledge that of the two Parisians and the rastaquouère whom we have seen, the interesting man is the rastaquouère."

While Corancez was speaking, the two young men had left their post of observation. He now led his companion toward the roulette rooms, adding these words, which made Hautefeuille quiver from head to foot:—

"If you have no objection we might look for Madame de Carlsberg, whom I left at one of these tables, and of whom I wish to take my leave. Fancy, she hates to have her friends near her while she is playing. But she must have lost all her money by this time."

"Does she play very much?" asked Hautefeuille, who now had no more desire to leave his friend than at first he had to follow him.

"As she does everything," Corancez answered, "capriciously and to beguile her ennui. And her marriage justifies her only too well. You know the prince? No? But you know his habits. Is it worth while to belong to the house of Hapsburg-Lorraine, to be called the Archduke Henry Francis, and to have a wife like that, if one is to profess the opinions of an anarchist, and spend sixteen hours out of the twenty-four in a laboratory, burning one's hands and beard and eyes over furnaces, and receive the friends of the Baroness in the way he does?"

"Then," said Hantefeuille, his arm trembling a little, as he asked his naïve question, "you think she is not happy?"

"You have only to look at her," replied Corancez, who, rising on his toes, had just recognized Madame de Carlsberg.

It was the one table that Pierre had not approached, on account of the crowd, which had been thicker around it than elsewhere. He signed to his companion that he was not tall enough to see over the mass of shoulders and heads; and Corancez, preceding his timid friend, began again to glide through the living wall of spectators, whose curiosity was evidently excited to the highest degree. The young men understood why, when, after several minutes of breathless struggling, they succeeded in gaining once more the place behind the croupier which they had had at the table of trente-et-quarante. There was taking place, in fact, one of those extraordinary events which become a legend on the coast and spread their fame through Europe and the two Americas; and Hautefeuille was shocked to discover that the heroine of this occasion was none else than the Baroness Ely, whose adorable name echoed in his heart with the sweetness of music. Yes, it was indeed Madame de Carlsberg who was the focus of all the eyes in this blasé multitude, and she employed in the caprices of her extravagant play the same gentle yet imposing grace that had inspired the young man with his passionate idolatry. Ah, she was so proud even at this moment, and so beautiful. Her delicate bust, the only part of her body he could see, was draped in a corsage of violet silk, covered with a black plaited mousseline de soie, with sleeves of the same stuff which seemed to tremble at every movement. A set of Danube pearls, enormous and set with brilliants, formed a clasp for this corsage, over which fell a thin watch-chain of gold studded with various stones. She wore a diminutive hat, composed of two similar wings, spangled with silver and with violet sequins. This stylish trinket, resting on her black hair, divided simply into two heavy folds, contrasted, like her dress and like her present occupation, with the character of her physiognomy. Her face was one of those, so rare in our aging civilization, imprinted with la grande beauté, the beauty that is unaffected by age, for it lies in the essential lines of the features, the shape of the head, the form of the brow, the curve of the chin, the droop of the eyelids. To those who knew of the Greek blood in her veins, the classic nobility of her face explained itself. Her father, General de Sallach, when aide-de-camp of the Commander-in-Chief at Zara, had married for love a Montenegrin girl at Bocca da Cattaro, who was the daughter of a woman of Salonica. This blood alone could have moulded a face at the same time so magnificent and so delicate, whose warm pallor added to its vague suggestion of the Orient. But her eyes lacked the happy and passionate lustre of the East. They were of an indefinable color, brown verging upon yellow, with something dim about them, as though perpetually obscured by an inner distress. One read in them an ennui so profound, a lassitude so incurable, that after perceiving this expression one began in spite of one's self to pity this woman apparently so fortunate, and to feel an impulse to obey her slightest whim if so her admirable face might lose that look, if but for a second. Yet doubtless it was one of those effects of the physiognomy which signify nothing of the soul, for her eyes retained the same singular expression at this moment while she abandoned herself to the wild fancies of the play. She must have gained an enormous sum since Corancez had left her, for a pile of thousand-franc notes—fifty perhaps—lay before her, and many columns of twenty-franc and hundred-franc pieces. Her gloved hands, armed with a little rake, manipulated this mass of money with dexterous grace. The cause of the feverish curiosity around her was that she risked at every turn the maximum stake: nine napoleons on a single number, that of her age, thirty-one, an equal number of napoleons on the squares, and six thousand francs on the black. The alternations of loss and gain were so great, and she met them with such evident impassibility, that she naturally had become the centre of interest. Oblivious to the comments that were whispered around her, she seemed scarcely to interest herself even in the ball that bounded over the numbered compartments.

"I assure you that she is an archduchess," said one.

"She is a Russian princess," declared another; "there is no one but a Russian for that game there."

"Let her win but three or four times and the bank is broken."

"She can't win, it is only the color that saves her."

"I believe in her luck. I will play her number."

"I'll play against her. Her luck is turning."

"Her hands," Corancez whispered to Hautefeuille. "Look at her hands; even under her gloves, the hands of the genuine aristocrat. See the others beside her, the motion of those greedy and nervous paws. All those fingers are plebeian after you have seen hers. But I am afraid we have brought her bad luck. Red and 7: she has lost—Oh, lost again. That means twenty-five thousand francs. If the word were not too vulgar to apply to such a pretty woman, I would say, 'What stomach!' She is going on."

The young woman continued to distribute her gold and bank-notes upon the same number, the same squares, and upon the black, and it seemed as though neither the numbers, nor the squares, nor the black would ever appear again. A few more turns, and the columns of twenty-franc and hundred-franc pieces had disappeared as into a crucible, and, six by six, the bank-notes had gone under the rake to join the pile heaped up before the croupier. A quarter of an hour had scarcely elapsed since the arrival of Corancez and Hautefeuille, and the Baroness Ely had nothing before her but a little empty purse and a Russian cigarette case of gold inlaid with niello and with sapphires, rubies, and diamonds. The young woman weighed the case in her hand, while another turn of the wheel brought up the red again.

It was the eleventh time that this color had won. Suddenly, with the same air of indifference, she turned to her neighbor, a large man of about fifty years, with a square head and wearing spectacles, who had abandoned his book of calculations to play simply against her. He had before him now a mass of gold and bank-notes.

"Monsieur," she said, handing him the case, "will you give me a thousand francs for this box?"

She spoke loud enough for Corancez and Hautefeuille, who had approached, to hear this strange and unexpected question.

"But we should be the ones to lend her the money," said Pierre.

"I should not advise you to offer it," the other replied. "She is very much of an archduchess when she chooses, and I fancy she would not receive us well. However, there will be plenty of usurers to buy the case at that price, if the man in the spectacles does not accept.—He is speaking German. He doesn't understand.—Well, what did I tell you?"

As though to support Corancez's pretensions to prophecy, just as Madame de Carlsberg was replying to her neighbor in German, the hook-nose of a jewel merchant penetrated the crowd, a hand held out the thousand-franc note, and the gold case disappeared. The Baroness did not deign even to glance at this personage, who was one of the innumerable moneylenders that practise a vagrant usury around the tables. She took the bank-note, and twisted it a moment without unfolding it. She waited until the red had appeared twice more; seemed to hesitate; then, with the end of her rake, pushed the note toward the croupier, saying:—

"On the red."

The ball spun round again, and this time it was the black. Baroness Ely picked up her fan and her empty purse, and rose. In the movement of the crowd, while he was endeavoring to extricate himself in order to reach her, Corancez suddenly noticed that he had lost Hautefeuille.

"The awkwardness of that innocent boy," he murmured, while waiting for Madame de Carlsberg.

If the vanity of speaking to the wife—even morganatic—of an archduke of Austria had not absorbed him at this moment, he might have observed his companion making his way to the purchaser of the jewel so fantastically sold. And perhaps he would have found the bargain very clever which was made with this innocent boy, had he seen him take from his pocket-book two bank-notes and receive from the usurer the case which had a few moments ago sparkled on the table before the Baroness. The usurer had sold the jewel to the lover for twice the sum that he had paid. Such is the beginning of great business houses.

CHAPTER II
THE CRY OF A SOUL

If Pierre Hautefeuille's action had escaped the malicious eyes of Corancez, it had not, however, passed unperceived. Another person had seen the Baroness Ely sell the gold box, and the young man buy it; and this person was one whom the unfortunate lover should have most feared. For to be seen by her was to be seen by Madame de Carlsberg herself, as the witness of the two successive sales was no other than Madame Brion, the confidante of Baroness Ely, residing at the same villa, and sure to report what she had seen. But to explain the singular interest with which Madame Brion had observed these two scenes, and the attitude with which she was about to speak of it to her friend, it is necessary to relate the circumstances that had caused so close an intimacy between the wife of a Parisian financier of such low birth as Horace Brion, and a noble lady of the European Olympus, who figured in the Almanach de Gotha among the Imperial family of Austria. The peculiarity of the cosmopolitan world, the trait that gives it its psychological picturesqueness, in spite of the banal character inevitable to a society composed of the rich and the idle, is the constant surprises of connections like this. This society serves as the point of intersection for destinies that have started from the widest extremities of the social world. One may see there the interplay of natures so dissimilar, often so hostile, that their simplest emotions have a savor of strangeness, the poetry of unfamiliar things. Just as the love of Pierre Hautefeuille, this Frenchman so profoundly, so completely French, for a foreigner so charming as the Baroness Ely, with a charm so novel, so difficult for the young man to analyze, was destined to occupy a place of such importance in his sentimental life, so the friendship between the Baroness Ely and Louise Brion could not fail to be a thing of special and peculiar value in their lives, although its material circumstances were, like everything in the cosmopolitan world, as natural in their details as they were strange in their results.

This friendship, like most lasting affections, began early, when the two women were but sixteen. They had ended their girlhood together in the intimacy of a convent, which is usually terminated at the entrance into society. But when these attachments endure, when they survive through absence, unaffected by difference of surroundings, or by new engagements, they become as instinctive and indestructible as family ties. When the two friends first met, the name of one was Ely de Sallach, the other, Louise Rodier of the old family of Catholic bankers, now extinct, the Rodier-Vimal. Certainly from their birthplaces, one the Château de Sallach in the heart of the Styrian Alps, the other the Hôtel Rodier in the Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré, it would seem that their paths of life must forever separate. A similar misfortune brought them together. They lost their mothers at the same time, and almost at once their fathers both married again. Each of the young girls, during the months that followed these second marriages, had had trouble with her step-mother; and each had finally been exiled to the Convent du Sacré-Cœur at Paris. The banker had chosen this establishment because he managed the funds and knew the superioress. General Sallach had been urged to this choice by his wife, who thus got rid of her step-daughter and gained a pretext for coming often to Paris. Entering the same day the old convent in the Rue de Varenne, the two orphans felt an attraction toward each other which their mutual confidences soon deepened into passionate friendship; and this friendship had lasted because it was based upon the profoundest depths of their characters and was strengthened by time.

The classic tragedy was not so far from nature as hostile critics pretend, when it placed beside its protagonists those personages whose single duty was to receive their confidences. There are in the reality of daily life souls that seem to be but echoes, ever ready to listen to the sighs and moans of others—soul-mirrors whose entire life is in the reflection they receive, whose personality is but the image projected upon them. On her entrance into the convent Louise Brion had become one of this race, whose adorable modesty Shakespeare has embodied in Horatio, the heroic and loyal second in Hamlet's duel with the assassin of his father. At sixteen as at thirty, it was only necessary to look at her to divine the instinctive self-effacement of a timidly sensitive character, incapable of asserting itself, or of living its own life. Her face was a delicate one, but its fineness passed unnoticed, so great was the reserve in her modest features, in her eyes of ashen gray, the simple folds of her brown hair. She spoke but little, and in a voice without accent; she had the genius for simplicity in dress, the style of dress that in the argot of women has the pretty epithet "tranquille." Whether man or woman, these beings, so weak and delicate, with their fine shades of sentiment, unfitted for active life, their desires instinctively attenuated, usually attach themselves, in a seeming contradiction which is at bottom logical, to some ardent and impetuous character, whose audacity fascinates them. They feel an irresistible desire to participate, through sympathy and imagination, in the joy and pain which they have not the force to encounter in their own experience. That was the secret of the relations between Madame Brion and the Baroness de Carlsberg. From the first week of their girlish intimacy, the passionate and fantastic Ely had bewitched the reasonable and quiet Louise, and this witchery had continued through the years, gaining from the fact that after their departure from the convent the two friends had once more experienced an analogous misfortune. They had both been in their marriage victims of paternal ambition. Louise Rodier had become Madame Brion, because old Rodier, having fallen into secret difficulties, thought that he could save himself by accepting Horace Brion as a son-in-law and partner. The latter, after his father had been ruined in the Bourse, had, in fifteen energetic years, not only made a fortune, but won a kind of financial fame by re-establishing affairs supposed to be hopeless, such as the Austro-Dalmatian Railway, so feloniously launched and abandoned by the notorious Justus Hafner (vide "Cosmopolis"). To efface the memory of his father Brion needed to ally himself with one of those families of finance whose professional honor is an equivalent of a noble title. The chief of the house of Rodier-Vimal needed an aide-de-camp of distinguished superiority in the secret crisis of his affairs. Louise, knowing the necessity of this union, had accepted it, and had been horribly unhappy.

It was the same year that Ely de Sallach, constrained by her father, married the Archduke Henry Francis, who had fallen in love with her at Carlsbad, with one of those furious passions that may overtake a blasé prince of forty-five, for whom the experience of feeling is so violent and unexpected that he clings to it with all the fever of youth momentarily recaptured. The Emperor, though very hostile on principle to morganatic marriages, had consented to this one in the hope that the most revolutionary and disquieting of his cousins would quiet down and begin a new life. General Sallach had looked to the elevation of his daughter for a field-marshalship. He and his wife had so persuaded the girl, that she, tempted herself by a vanity too natural at her age, had yielded.

Twelve years had passed since then, and the two old friends of Sacré-Cœur were still just as orphaned and as solitary and unhappy, one in the glittering rôle of a demi-princess, the other, queen of the great bank, as on the day when they first met under the trees of the garden by the Boulevard des Invalides. They had never ceased to write to each other; and each having seen the image of her own sorrow in the destiny of the other, their affection had been deepened by their mutual misery, by all their confidences, and by their silence, too.

The hardness of the financier, his ferocious egoism, disguised beneath the studied manners of a sham man of the world, his brutal sensuality, had made it possible for Louise to understand the miseries of poor Ely, abandoned to the jealous despotism of a cruel and capricious master, in whom the intellectual nihilism of an anarchist was associated with the imperious pride of a tyrant; while the Baroness was able to sympathize, through the depth of her own misery, with the wounds that bled in the tender heart of her friend. But she, daughter of a soldier, the descendant of those heroes of Tchernagora, who had never surrendered, was not submissive, like the heiress of the good Rodier and Vimal families. She had immediately opposed her own pride and will to those of her husband. The atrocious scenes she had passed through without quailing would have ended in open rupture if the young woman had not thought of appealing to a very high authority. A sovereign influence commanded a compromise, thanks to which the Baroness recovered her independence without divorce or legal separation, with what rage on the part of her husband may be imagined.

In fact, in four years this was the first winter she had spent with the Archduke, who, being ill, had retired to his villa at Cannes—a strange place, truly, made in the image of its strange master; half of the house was a palace, and half a laboratory.

Madame Brion had witnessed from afar this conjugal drama, whose example she had not followed. The gentle creature, without a word, had let herself be wounded and broken by the hard fist of the brute whose name she bore. This contrast itself had made her friend dearer to her. Ely de Carlsberg had served her as her own rebellion, her own independence, her own romance—a romance in which she was ignorant of many chapters. For the confidences of two friends who see each other only at long intervals are always somewhat uncandid. Instinctively a woman who confesses to a friend guards against troubling the image which the friend forms of her; and that image gradually acquires a more striking resemblance to her past than to her present.

So the Baroness had concealed from her confidante all of one side of her life. Beautiful as she was, rich, free, audacious, and unburdened with principles, she had sought vengeance and oblivion of her domestic miseries where all women who have her temperament and her lack of religious faith seek a like oblivion and a like vengeance. She had had adventures—many adventures—Madame Brion had no suspicion of them. She loved the life in Ely, not realizing that this movement, this vitality, this energy, could not exist in a creature of her race and her freedom without leading to culpable experiences. But is it not the first quality, even the very definition, of friendship, this inconsistent favoritism which causes us to forget with certain persons the well-known law of the simultaneous development of merits and faults, and the necessary bond that connects these contrary manifestations of the same individuality?

Yet, however blinded by friendship a woman may be, and however honest and uninitiated in the gallant intrigues that go on around her, she is none the less a woman, and as such apparently possesses a special instinct for sexual matters, which enables her to feel how her confidential friend conducts herself toward men. Louise could not have formulated the change in Ely, and yet for years, at every interview, she had perceived the change. Was it a greater freedom in manner and dress, a shade of boldness in her glance, a readiness to put an evil interpretation on every intimacy she noticed, an habitual disenchantment, almost a cynicism, in her conversation?

The signs that reveal the woman who has dared to overstep conventional prejudices, as well as moral principles, Madame Brion could not help remarking in Madame de Carlsberg; but she did not permit herself to analyze them, or even think about them. Delicate souls, who are created for love, feel a self-reproach, almost a remorse, at the discovery of a fault in one they love. They blame themselves and their impressions, rather than judge the person from whom the impressions were received. An uneasiness remains, however, which the first precise fact renders insupportable.

To Louise Brion this little fact had appeared in the recent attitude of her friend toward Pierre Hautefeuille. She chanced to be at Cannes when the young man was presented to the Baroness at the Chésy residence. On that evening she had been surprised at Ely, who had had a long talk with the young stranger en tête-à-tête in a corner of the drawing-room. Having left at once for Monte Carlo, she doubtless would not have thought of it again, if, on another visit to Cannes, she had not found the young man on a footing of very sudden intimacy at the Villa Carlsberg. Staying herself a few days at the villa, she was forced to recognize that her friend was either a great coquette or was very imprudent with Hautefeuille. She had chosen the hypothesis of imprudence. She told herself that this boy was falling wildly in love with Ely, and she was capable, out of mere carelessness or ennui, of accepting a diversion of that kind. Louise resolved to warn her, but did not dare, overcome by that inner paralysis which the strong produce in the weak by the simple magnetism of their presence.

The little scene which she had observed this evening in the Casino had given her the courage to speak. The action of Pierre Hautefeuille, his haste to procure the jewel sold by Madame de Carlsberg, had singularly moved this faithful friend. She had suddenly perceived the analogy between her own feelings and those of the lover.

Having herself mingled with the crowd of spectators to follow the play of her friend, whose nervousness had all day disquieted her, she had seen her sell the gold case. This Bohemian act had pained her cruelly, and still more the thought that this jewel which Ely used continually would be bought in a second-hand shop of Monte Carlo and given by some lucky gambler to some demi-mondaine. She had immediately started toward the usurer, with the same purpose as Pierre Hautefeuille; and to discover that he had been moved by the same idea touched a deep chord of sympathy in her. She had been moved in her affection for Madame de Carlsberg, and in a secret spot of her gentle and romantic nature, so little used to find in men an echo of her own delicacy.

"Unfortunate man," she murmured. "What I feared has come. He loves her. Is there still time to warn Ely, and keep her from having on her conscience the unhappiness of this boy?"

It was this thought that determined the innocent, good creature to speak to her friend as soon as she had an opportunity; and the opportunity presented itself at this moment.

They had come out of the Casino at about eleven o'clock, escorted by Brion, who had left them at the villa, and, when they were alone, the Baroness had asked her friend to walk a while in the garden to enjoy the night, which was really divine. Enveloped in their furs, they began to pace the terrace and the silent alleys, captivated by the contrast between the feverish atmosphere in which they had spent the evening and the peaceful immensity of the scene that now surrounded them. And the contrast was no less surprising between the Baroness Ely at roulette and the Baroness Ely walking at this hour.

The moon, shining full in the vast sky, seemed to envelop her with light, to cast upon her a charm of languorous exaltation. Her lips were half open, as though drinking in the purity of the cold, beautiful night, and the pale rays seemed to reach her heart through her eyes, so intently did she gaze at the silver disk which illumined the whole horizon with almost the intensity of noon. The sea above all was luminous, a sea of velvet blue, over which a white fire, quivering and dying, traced its miraculous way. The atmosphere was so pure that in the bright bay one could distinguish the rigging of two yachts, motionless, at anchor by the Cape, upon whose heights stood the crenellated walls of the old Grimaldi palace. The huge, dark mass of Cape Martin stretched out on the other side; and everywhere was the contrast of transparent brilliancy and sharp, black forms, stamped on the dream-like sky. The long branches of the palms, the curved poignards of the aloes, the thick foliage of the orange trees hung in deep shadow over the grass where the fairy moonlight played in all its splendor.

One by one the lights went out in the houses, and from the terrace the two women could see them, white amid the dark olives sleeping in the universal sleep that had fallen everywhere. The quiet of the hour was so perfect that no sound could be heard but the crackling of the gravel under their small shoes, and the rustle of their dresses. Madame de Carlsberg was the first to break the silence, yielding to the pleasure of thinking aloud, so delicious at such a time and with such a friend. She had paused a moment to gaze more intently at the sky:—

"How pure the night is, and how soft. When I was a child at Sallach, I had a German governess who knew the names of all the stars. She taught me to recognize them. I can find them still: there is the Pole Star and Cassiopeia and the Great Bear and Arcturus and Vega. They are always in the same place. They were there before we were born, and will be after we are dead. Do you ever think of it—that the night looked just the same to Marie Antoinette, Mary Stuart, Cleopatra, all the women who, across the years and the centuries, represent immense disasters, tragic sorrows, and splendid fame? Do you ever think that they have watched this same moon and these stars in the same part of the heavens, and with the same eyes as ours, with the same delight and sadness; and that they have passed away as we shall beneath these motionless stars, eternally indifferent to our joy and misery? When these thoughts come to me, when I think of what poor creatures we are, with all our agonies that cannot move an atom of this immensity, I ask myself what matter our laws, our customs, our prejudices, our vanity in supposing that we are of any importance in this magnificent eternal and impassive universe. I say to myself that there is but one thing of value here below: to satisfy the heart, to feel, to drain every emotion to the bottom, to go to the end of all our desires, in short, to live one's own life, one's real life, free of all lies and conventions, before we sink into the inevitable annihilation."

There was something frightful in hearing these nihilistic words on the lips of this beautiful young woman, and on such a night, in such a scene. To the tender and religious Madame Brion these words were all the more painful since they were spoken with the same voice that had directed the croupier where to place the final stake. She greatly admired Ely for that high intelligence which enabled her to read all books, to write in four or five languages, to converse with the most distinguished men and on every subject.

Trained until her seventeenth year in the solid German manner, the Baroness Ely had found, at first in the society of the Archduke, then in her life in Italy, an opportunity for an exceptional culture from which her supple mind of a demi-Slave had profited.

Alas! of what use was that learning, that facile comprehension, that power of expression, since she had not learned to govern her caprices—as could be seen in the attitude at the roulette table—nor to govern her thoughts—which was too well shown by the sombre creed that she had just confessed? That inner want, among so many gifts and accomplishments, once more oppressed the faithful friend, who had never brought herself to admit the existence of certain ideas in her companion of Sacré-Cœur. And she said:—

"You speak again as though you did not believe in another life. Is it possible that you are sincere?"

"No, I do not believe in it," the Baroness replied, with a shake of her pretty head, a breath of air lifting the long, silky fur of her sable cape. "That was the one good influence my husband had over me; but he had that. He cured me of that feeble-heartedness that dares not look the truth in the face. The truth is that man has never discovered a trace of a Providence, of a pity or justice from on high, the sign of anything above us but blind and implacable force. There is no God. There is nothing but this world. That is what I know now, and I am glad to know it. I like to oppress myself with the thought of the ferocity and stupidity of the universe. I find in it a sort of savage pleasure, an inner strength."

"Do not talk like that," interrupted Madame Brion, clasping her arms around her friend as though she were a suffering sister or a child. "You make me feel too sad. But," she continued, pressing the hand of the Baroness while they resumed their walk, "I know you have a weight on your heart of which you do not tell me. You have never been happy. You are less so than ever to-day, and you blame God for your hard fate. You relieve yourself in blasphemy as you did to-night in play, wildly, desperately, as they say some men drink; don't deny it. I was there all the evening, hidden in the crowd, while you were playing. Pardon me. You had been so nervous all day. You had worried me. And I did not want to leave you five minutes alone. And, my Ely, I saw you sitting among those women and those men, playing so unreasonably in the sight of all that crowd whispering your name. I saw you sell the case you used so much. Ah, my Ely, my Ely!"

A heavy sigh accompanied this loved name, repeated with passionate tenderness. That innocent affection which suffered from the faults of its idol without daring to formulate a reproach, touched the Baroness, and made her a little ashamed. She disguised her feelings in a laugh, which she attempted to make gay, in order to quiet her friend's emotion.

"How fortunate that I didn't see you! I should have borrowed money from you and lost it. But do not worry; it will not happen again. I had heard so often of the gambling fever that I wished just once, not to trifle as I usually do, but really play. It is even more annoying than it was stupid. I regret nothing but the cigarette case." She hesitated a moment. "It was the souvenir of a person who is no longer in this world. But I shall find the merchant to-morrow."

"That is useless," said Madame Brion, quickly. "He no longer has it."

"You have already bought it? How I recognize my dear friend in that!"

"I thought of doing it," Louise answered in a low voice, "but some one else was before me."

"Some one else?" said Madame de Carlsberg, with a sudden look of haughtiness. "Whom you saw and whom I know?" she asked.

"Whom I saw and whom you know," answered Madame Brion. "But I dare not tell the name, now that I see how you take it.—And yet, it is not one whom you have the right to blame, for if he has fallen in love with you, it is indeed your fault. You have been so imprudent with him—let me say it, so coquettish!"

Then, after a silence: "It was young Pierre Hautefeuille."

The excellent woman felt her heart beat as she pronounced these last words. She was anxious to prevent Madame de Carlsberg from continuing a flirtation which she thought dangerous and culpable; but the anger which she had seen come into her friend's face made her fear that she had gone too far, and would draw down upon the head of the imprudent lover one of Ely's fits of rage, and she reproached herself as for an indelicacy, almost a treachery toward the poor boy whose tender secret she had surprised.

But it was not anger that, at the mention of this name, had changed the expression of Madame de Carlsberg and flushed her cheeks with a sudden red. Her friend, who knew her so well, could see that she was overcome with emotion, but very different from her injured pride of a moment before. She was so astonished that she stopped speaking. The Baroness made no answer, and the two women walked on in silence. They had entered an alley of palm trees, flecked with moonlight, but still obscure. And as Madame Brion could no longer see the face of her friend, her own emotions became so strong that she hazarded, tremblingly:—

"Why do you not answer me? Is it because you think I should have prevented the young man from doing what he did? But for your sake I pretended not to have seen it. Are you wounded at my speaking of your coquetry? You know I would not have spoken in that way, if I did not so esteem your heart."

"You wound me?" said the Baroness. "You? You know that is impossible. No, I am not wounded. I am touched. I did not know he was there," she added in a lower tone, "that he saw me at that table, acting as I did. You think that I have flirted with him? Wait, look."

And as they had reached the end of the alley, she turned. Tears were slowly running down her cheeks. Through her eyes, from whence these tears had fallen, Louise could read to the bottom of her soul, and the evidence which before she had not dared to believe now forced itself upon her.

"Oh! you are weeping." And, as though overcome by the moral tragedy which she now perceived, "You love him!" she cried, "you love him!"

"What use to hide it now?" Ely answered. "Yes, I love him! When you told me what he did this evening, which proves, as I know, that he loves me, too, it touched me in a painful spot. That is all. I should be happy, should I not? And you see I am all upset. If you but knew the circumstances in which this sentiment overtook me, my poor friend, you would indeed pity your Ely. Ah!" she repeated, "pity her, pity her!"

And, resting her head on her friend's shoulder, she began to weep, to weep like a child, while the other, bewildered at this sudden and unexpected outburst, replied—revealing even in her pity the naïveté of an honest woman, incapable of suspicion:—

"I beg you calm yourself. It is true it is a terrible misfortune for a woman to love when she has no right to satisfy it. But, do not feel remorseful, and, above all, do not think I blame you. When I spoke as I did it was to put you on your guard against a wrong that you might do. Ah! I see too well that you have not been a coquette. I know you have not allowed the young man to divine your feelings, and I know, too, that he will never divine them, and that you will be always my blameless Ely. Calm yourself, smile for me. Is it not good to have a friend, a real friend, who can understand you?"

"Understand me? Poor Louise! You love me, yes, you love me well. But you do not know me."

Then, in a kind of transport, she took her friend's arm, and, looking her in the face, "Listen!" she said, "you believe me still to be, as I was once, your blameless Ely. Well, it is not true. I have had a lover. Hush, do not answer. It must be said. It is said. And that lover is the most intimate friend of Pierre Hautefeuille, a friend to him as you are to me, a brother in friendship as you are my sister. That is the weight that you have divined here," and she laid her hand upon her breast. "It is horrible to bear."

Certain confessions are so irremediable that their frankness gives to those who voluntarily make them something of grandeur and nobility even in their fall; and when the confession is made by some one whom we love, as Louise loved Ely, it fills us with a delirium of tenderness for the being who proves her nobility by her confession while the misery of her shame rends her heart. If a few hours before, in some house at Monte Carlo, the slightest word had been said against the honor of Madame de Carlsberg, what indignation would Madame Brion have not felt, and what pain! Pain she indeed had, agonizing pain, as Ely pronounced these unforgetable words; but of indignation there was not a trace in the heart which replied with these words, whose very reproach was a proof of tenderness, blind and indulgent to complicity:—

"Just God! How you must have suffered! But why did you not tell me before? Why did you not confide in me? Did you think that I would love you less? See, I have the courage to hear all."

And she added, in that thirst for the whole truth which we have for the faults of those who are dear to us, as though we looked to find a pardonable excuse in the cruel details:—

"I beg you, tell me all, all. And first, this man? Do I know him?"

"No," replied Madame de Carlsberg, "his name is Olivier du Prat. I met him at Rome two years ago when I was spending the winter there. That was the period of my life when I saw you least, and wrote to you least frequently. It was also the time when I was the most wicked, owing to solitude, inaction, unhappiness, and my disgust with everything, especially with myself. This man was the secretary of one of the two French embassies. He was much lionized because of the passion, he had inspired in two Roman ladies, who almost openly disputed his favors. It is very ignoble, what I am going to tell you, but such was the truth. It amused me to win him from them both. In that kind of an adventure, just as in play, one expects to find the emotions that others have found in it, and then the result is the same as in roulette. One is bored with it, and one throws one's self into the game from wilfulness and vanity, in the excitement of an absurd struggle. I know now," and her voice became graver, "that I never loved Olivier, but that I so persisted in this liaison that he would have the right to say that I wished him to love me, that I wished to be his mistress, and that I did all I could to retain him. He was a singular character, very different from those professional lovers, who are for the most part frightfully vulgar. He was so changeable, so protean, so full of contrasts, so intangible, that to this day I cannot tell whether he loved me or not. You hear me in a dream, and I am speaking as in a dream. I feel that there was something inexplicable in our relations, something unintelligible to a third person. I have never met a being so disconcerting, so irritating, from the endless uncertainty he kept you in, no matter what you did. One day he would be emotional, tremulous, passionate even to frenzy, and on the morrow, sometimes the same day, he would recoil within himself from confidence to suspicion, from tenderness to persiflage, from abandonment to irony, from love to cruelty, without it being possible either to doubt his sincerity or to discover the cause of this incredible alteration. He had these humors not only in his emotions, but even in his ideas. I have seen him moved to tears by a visit to the Catacombs, and on returning as outrageously atheistical as the Archduke. In society I have seen him hold twenty people enraptured by the charm of his brilliant fancy, and then pass weeks without speaking two words. In short, he was from head to foot a living enigma, which I penetrate better at a distance. He had been early left an orphan. His childhood had been unhappy, and his youth precociously disenchanted. He had been wounded and corrupted too soon. Thence came that insatiability of soul, that elusiveness of character which appeared as soon as I became interested in him in a kind of spasmodic force. When I was young at Sallach I loved to mount difficult horses and try to master them. I cannot better describe my relations with Olivier than by comparing them to a duel between a rider and his horse, when each tries to get the better of the other. I repeat it, I am sure I did not love him. I am not certain that I did not hate him."

She spoke with a dryness that showed how deeply these memories were implanted. She paused a moment, and, plucking a rose from a bush near her, she began to bite the petals nervously, while Madame Brion sighed:—

"Need I pity you for that also,—for having sought happiness out of marriage, and for having met this man, this hard and capricious monster of egoism?"

"I do not judge of him," Madame de Carlsberg answered. "If I had been different myself, I should doubtless have changed him. But he had touched me in an irritable spot; I wished to control him, to master him, and I used a terrible weapon. I made him jealous. All that is a bitter story, and I spare you the details. It would be painful to recall it, and it does not matter. You will know enough when I say that after a day of intimacy, when he had been more tender than ever before, Olivier left Rome suddenly, without an explanation, without a word of adieu, without even writing a letter. I have never seen him again. I have never heard of him, except in a chance conversation this winter, when I learned that he was married. Now you will understand the strange emotions I felt when two months ago Chésy asked permission to present a son of a friend of his mother, who had come to Cannes to recover from a bad cold, a young man, rather solitary and very charming; his name was Pierre Hautefeuille. In the countless conversations that Olivier and I had together in the intervals of our quarrelling, this name had often been spoken. Here again I must explain to you a very peculiar thing,—the nature of this man's conversation and the extraordinary attraction it had for me. This self-absorbed and enigmatic being had sudden hours of absolute expansion which I have seen in no one else. It was as though he relived his life aloud for me, and I listened with an unparalleled curiosity. He used at these times a kind of implacable lucidity which almost made you cry out, like a surgical operation, and which at the same time hypnotized you with a potent fascination. It was a brutal yet delicate disrobing of his childhood and his youth, with characterizations of such vividness that certain individuals were presented to me as distinctly as though I had really met them. And he himself? Ah, what a strange soul, incomplete and yet superior, so noble and so degraded, so sensitive and so arid, in whom there seemed to be nothing but lassitude, failure, stain, and disillusionment—excepting one sentiment. This man who despised his family, who never spoke of his country without bitterness, who attributed the worst motive to every action, even his own, who denied the existence of God, of virtue, of love, this moral nihilist, in short, in so many ways like the Archduke, had one faith, one cult, one religion. He believed in friendship, that of man for man, denying that one woman could be the friend of another. He did not know you, dear friend. He pretended—I recall his very words—that between two men who had proved each other, who had lived, and thought, and suffered together, and who esteemed each other while loving each other, there arises a kind of affection so high, so profound, and so strong that nothing can be compared with it. He said that this sentiment was the only one he respected, the only one that time and change could not prevail against. He acknowledged that this friendship was rare; yet he declared that he had met with it several times, and that he himself had experienced one in his life. It was then that he evoked the image of Pierre Hautefeuille. His accent, his look, his whole expression changed while he lingered over the memory of his absent friend. He, the man of all the ironies, recounted with tenderness and respect the naïve details of their first meeting at school, their growing attachment, their boyish vacations. He related with enthusiasm their enlisting together in 1870, and the war, their adventures, their captivity in Germany. He was never tired of praising his friend's purity of soul, his delicacy, his nobility. I have already said that this man was an enigma to me. Such he was above all in his retrospective confidences, to which I listened with astonishment, almost stupor, to behold this anomaly in a heart so lamentably withered, in a land so sterile this flower of delicate sentiment, so young and rare that it made me think—and in spite of Olivier's paradox, it is the highest praise I could give—of our own friendship."

"Thanks," said Madame Brion, "you make me happy. As I listened to you a moment ago I seemed to hear another person speaking whom I did not recognize. But now I have found you again, so loving, gentle, and good."

"No, not good," Madame de Carlsberg replied. "The proof is that no sooner had Chésy pronounced the name of Pierre Hautefeuille than I was possessed by an idea which you will think abominable. I shall pay for it, perhaps, dearly enough. Olivier's departure and then his marriage had stirred in me that hate of which I spoke. I could not hear to think that this man had left me as he did, and was now happy, contented, indifferent—that he had regained his serenity without my being revenged. One acquires these base passions by living as I have so long, unhappy and desperate, surrounded by pleasure and luxury. Too much moral distress is depraving. When I knew that I was to meet the intimate friend of Olivier, a possible vengeance offered itself to me, a refined, atrocious, and certain vengeance. My life was forever separated from that of Du Prat. He had probably forgotten me. I was sure that if I won the affections of his friend, and he knew of it, it would strike the deepest and most sensitive place in his heart; and that is why I permitted Chésy to present Hautefeuille, and why I indulged in those coquetries for which you blamed me. For it is true that I began thus. Dieu! how recent it was, and how long ago it seems!"

"But," interrupted Madame Brion, "does Pierre Hautefeuille know of your relations with Olivier?"

"Ah! you touch me in the sorest spot. He is ignorant of them, as he is of all the base realities of life. It is by his innocence, his simplicity of heart, of which his friend so often spoke—his youth, in short—that this boy, against whom I began so cruel a plot, has won me completely. Never has a doubt or a suspicion entered that heart, so young and so innocent of evil, for which evil does not even exist. I had not spoken with him three times before I understood all that Olivier had said in our conversations at Rome, which left me incredulous and irritated. That respect, that veneration almost, which he professed for this candor and goodness, I felt also in my turn. All the expressions he had used in speaking of his friend came back to me, and at every new encounter I perceived how just they were, how fine, and how true. In my surprise I relinquished my plan of vengeance at the contact of this nature so young and delicate, whose perfume I inhaled as I do that of this flower."

And she lifted to her face the rose with its half-nibbled petals.

"If you only knew how the life I lead wearies and oppresses me! How tired I am of hearing about nothing but the breakfasts that Dickie Marsh gives on his yacht to the grand dukes, of Navagero's bezique with the Prince of Wales, of Chésy's speculations at the Bourse, and the half-dozen titled fools that follow his advice! If you only knew how even the best of this artificial society tires me! What does it matter to me whether Andryana Bonnacorsi decides to marry the Sire de Corancez, or any of the countless subjects of gossip at the five o'clock teas in Cannes? And I need not speak of the inferno my house has become since my husband suspects me of favoring the marriage of Flossie Marsh with his assistant. To meet in this artificial atmosphere, made up of ennui and vanity, folly and stupidity, a being who is at the same time profound and simple, genuine and romantic, in fact archaic, as I like to call him, was a delight. And then the moment came when I realized that I loved this young man and that he loved me. I learned it through no incident, no scene, no word—just by a look from him which I accidentally caught. That is why I have taken refuge here for the last eight days, I was afraid. I am still afraid—afraid for myself a little. I know myself too well, and I know that once started on that road of passion I would go to the end, I would stake my whole life upon it, and if I lost, if—"

She did not finish, but her friend understood her terrible forebodings as she continued: "And I am afraid for him, too, ah, much afraid! He is so young, so inexperienced! He believes so implicitly in me. I cannot better show you how I have changed than by saying this: six weeks ago, when Hautefeuille was presented to me, I had but one desire,—that Olivier should learn of my acquaintance with his friend. To-day, if I could prevent these two men from ever meeting, or from ever speaking of me to each other, I would give ten years of my life. Now do you understand why the tears came to my eyes when you told me what he did this evening, and how, without speaking to me, he had seen the way I spend my time away from him? I am ashamed, terribly ashamed. Think what it would be if he knew the rest!"

"And what are you going to do?" Madame Brion mournfully exclaimed. "These men will meet again. They will talk about you. And if Olivier loves his friend as you say he does, he will tell him all. Listen," she continued, clasping her hands, "listen to what the tenderest and most devoted affection advises you to do. I do not speak of your duty, of the opinion of the world, or the vengeance of your husband. I know you would brave all that, as you did before, to win your happiness. But you will not win it. You could not be happy in this love with that secret on your heart. You will be tortured by it, and if you speak—I know you, you must have thought of it—if you speak—"

"If I told him, I would never see him again," said Madame de Carlsberg. "Ah! without that certitude—"

"Well! Have the courage to do it," interrupted the other. "You had the strength to leave Cannes for a week. You should have enough to leave for good. You will not be alone. I will go with you. You will suffer. But what is that, when you think of what otherwise would happen,—that you would be everything to this young man, and he everything to you, and he would know that you had been the mistress of his friend!"

"Yes, I have thought of all that," replied the Baroness, "and then I remember I might have had six months, a year, and perhaps more. And that is to have lived, to have been in this hard world for a year one's self, one's true self, the being that one is in one's innermost and deepest reality."

And as she spoke she gazed at the sky with the same look that she had had at the beginning of the walk. She seemed once more to bathe her face in the moonlight, and to absorb the impassive serenity of the mountains and the stars, as though to gather force to go to the end of her desire. And as they resumed again in silence their promenade among the obscure palms, by the fragrant rose-beds, and beneath the sombre shadow of the orange trees, the faithful friend murmured:—

"I will save her in spite of herself."

CHAPTER III
A SCRUPLE

The "Sire" de Corancez—as Madame de Carlsberg disdainfully called the Southerner—was not a man to neglect the slightest detail that he thought advantageous to a well-studied plan. His father, the vine-grower, used to say to him, "Marius? Don't worry about Marius. He's a shrewd bird." And, in truth, at the very moment when the Baroness Ely was beginning her melancholy confidences in the deserted garden alleys of the Villa Brion, this adroit person discovered Hautefeuille at the station, installed him in the train between Chésy and Dickie Marsh and manœuvred so skilfully that before reaching Nice the American had invited Pierre to visit the next morning his yacht, the Jenny, anchored in the roadstead at Cannes. But the next morning would be the last hours that Corancez could spend at Cannes before his departure, ostensibly for Marseilles and Barbentane, in reality for Italy.

He had the promise of Florence Marsh that Hautefeuille's visit to the Jenny would be immediately followed by an invitation to take part in the cruise of the 14th. Would Pierre accept? Above all, would he consent to act as witness in that clandestine ceremony, at which the queerly named Venetian abbé, Don Fortunato Lagumina, would pronounce the words of eternal union between the millions of the deceased Francesco Bonnacorsi and the heir of the doubtful scutcheon of the Corancez? The Provençal had but this last morning to persuade his friend.

But he had no fear of failure, and at half-past nine, fresh, in spite of the fact that he had returned from Monte Carlo on the last train the night before, he briskly descended the steps of the hill that separates Cannes from the Gulf of Juan. Pierre Hautefeuille had installed himself for the winter in one of those hotels whose innumerable flower-framed windows line this height, which the people of Cannes have adorned with the exotic name of California.

It was one of those mornings of sun and wind—of fresh sunlight and warm breeze—which are the charm of winter on this coast. Roses bloomed by hundreds on hedge and terrace. The villas, white or painted, shone through their curtains of palm trees and araucarias, aloes and bamboos, mimosas and eucalyptus. The peninsula of La Croisette projected from the hill toward the islands, and its dark forest of pines, flecked with white houses, arose in strong relief between the tender blue of the sky and the sombre blue of the sea, and the Sire de Corancez went on gayly, a bouquet of violets in the buttonhole of the most becoming coat that a complacent tailor ever fashioned for a handsome young man in chase of an heiress, his small feet tightly fitted in russet shoes, a straw hat on his thick, black hair; his eyes bright, his teeth glistening in a half smile, his beard lustrous and scented, his movements graceful.

He was happy in the animal portion of his nature; a happiness that was wholly physical and sensual. He was able to enjoy the divine sunlight, the salt breeze, odorous with flowers; this atmosphere, soft as spring; to enjoy the morning and his own sense of youth, while the calculator within him soliloquized upon the character of the man he was about to rejoin and upon the chances of success:—

"Will he accept or not? Yes, he will beyond any doubt, when he knows that Madame de Carlsberg will be on the boat. Should I tell him? No; I would offend him. How his arm trembled in mine last night when I mentioned her name! Bah! Marsh or his niece will speak to him about her, or they are no Americans. That is their way—and it succeeds with them—to speak right out whatever they think or wish.—If he accepts? Is it prudent to have one more witness? Yes; the more people there are in the secret, the more Navagero will be helpless when the day comes for the great explanation.—A secret? With three women knowing it? Madame de Carlsberg will tell it all to Madame Brion. It will go no further on that side. Flossie Marsh will tell it all to young Verdier. And it will stop there, too. Hautefeuille? Hautefeuille is the most reliable of all.—How little some men change! There is a boy I have scarcely seen since our school-days. He is just as simple and innocent as when we used to confess our sins to the good Father Jaconet. He has learned nothing from life. He does not even suspect that the Baroness is as much in love with him as he with her. She will have to make a declaration to him. If we could talk it over together, she and I. Let nature have her way. A woman who desires a young man and does not capture him—that may occur, perhaps, in the horrible fogs of the North, but in this sunlight and among these flowers, never.—Good, here is his hotel. It would be convenient for a rendezvous, these barracks. So many people going in and out that a woman might enter ten times without being noticed."

Hôtel des Palmes—the name justified by a tropical garden—appeared in dazzling letters on the façade of this building, whose gray walls, pretentiously decorated with gigantic sculpture, arose at a bend of the road. The balconies were supported by colossal caryatides, the terrace by fluted columns. Pierre Hautefeuille occupied a modest room in this caravansary, which had been recommended by his doctor; and if, on the night before, his sentimental reverie in the hall at Monte Carlo had seemed paradoxical, his daily presence in a cell of this immense cosmopolitan hive was no less so.

Here he lived, retired, absorbed in his chimerical fancies, enveloped in the atmosphere of his dreams, while beside him, above him, and below him swarmed the agitated colony which the Carnival attracts to the coast. Again on this morning the indulgent mockery of Corancez might have found a fitting subject, if the heavy stones of the building had suddenly become transparent, and the enterprising Southerner had seen his friend, with his elbows on the writing-table, hypnotized before the gold box purchased the evening before; and his mockery would have changed to veritable stupefaction, had he been able to follow the train of this lover's thoughts, who, ever since his purchase, had been a prey to one of those fevers of remorseful anxiety which are the great tragedies of a timid and silent passion.

This fever had begun in the train on the way back from Monte Carlo amid the party collected by Corancez. One of Chésy's remarks had started it.

"Is it true," Chésy asked of Marius, "that Baroness Ely lost this evening a hundred thousand francs, and that she sold her diamonds to one of the gamblers in order to continue?"

"How history is written!" Corancez responded. "I was there with Hautefeuille. She lost this evening just what she had gained, that is all; and she sold a trifling jewel worth a hundred louis,—a gold cigarette case."

"The one she always uses?" asked Navagero; then gayly, "I hope the Archduke will not hear this story. Although a democrat, he is severe on the question of good form."

"Who do you suppose would tell him?" Corancez replied.

"The aide-de-camp, parbleu," exclaimed Chésy. "He spies into everything she does, and if the jewel is gone, the Archduke will hear of it."

"Bah! She will buy it back to-morrow morning. Monte Carlo is full of these honest speculators. They, in fact, are the only ones who win at the game."

While Hautefeuille was listening to this dialogue, every word of which pierced to his heart, he caught a glance from the Marquise Bonnacorsi—a look of curiosity, full of meaning to the timid lover, for he plainly read in it the knowledge of his secret. The subject of the conversation immediately changed, but the words that had been spoken and the expression in Madame Bonnacorsi's eyes sufficed to fill the young man with a remorse as keen as though the precious box had been taken from the pocket of his evening coat, and shown to all these people.

"Could the Marquise have seen me buy it?" he asked himself, trembling from head to foot. "And if she saw me, what does she think?"

Then, as she entered into conversation with Florence Marsh, and appeared once more to be perfectly indifferent to his existence, "No, I am dreaming," he thought; "it is not possible that she saw me. I was careful to observe the people who were there. I was mistaken. She looked at me in that fixed way of hers which means nothing. I was dreaming. But what the others said was not a dream. This cigarette case she will wish to buy back to-morrow. She will find the merchant. He will tell her that he has sold it. He will describe me. If she recognizes me from his description?"

At this thought he trembled once more. In a sudden hallucination he saw the little parlor of the Villa Helmholtz—the Archduke had thus named his house after the great savant who had been his master. The lover saw the Baroness Ely sitting by the fire in a dress of black lace with bows of myrtle green, the one of her dresses which he most admired. He saw himself entering this parlor in the afternoon; he saw the furniture, the flowers in their vases, the lamps with their tinted shades, all these well-loved surroundings, and a different welcome—a look in which he would perceive, not by a wild hypothesis this time, but with certitude, that Madame de Carlsberg knew what he had done. The pain which the mere thought of this caused him brought him back to reality.

"I am dreaming again," he said to himself, "but it is none the less certain that I have been very imprudent—even worse, indelicate. I had no right to buy that box. No, I had no right. I risked, in the first place, the chance of being seen, and of compromising her. And then, even as it is, if some indiscreet remark is made, and if the Prince makes an investigation?"

In another hallucination he saw the Archduke Henry Francis and the Baroness face to face. He saw the beautiful, the divine eyes of the woman he loved fill with tears. She would suffer in her private life once more, and from his fault, on account of him who would have given all his blood with delight in order that mouth so wilfully sad might smile with happiness. Thus the most imaginary, but also the most painful of anxieties commenced to torture the young man, while Miss Marsh and Corancez in a corner of the compartment exchanged in a low voice these comments:—

"I shall ask my uncle to invite him, that's settled," said the young American girl. "Poor boy, I have a real sympathy for him. He looks so melancholy. They have pained him by talking so of the Baroness."

"No, no," said Corancez. "He is in despair at having missed, by his own fault, a chance of speaking with his idol this evening. Imagine, at the moment when I went up to her—piff—my Hautefeuille disappeared. He is remorseful at having been too timid. That is a sentiment which I hope never to feel."

Remorse. The astute Southerner did not realize how truly he had spoken. He was mistaken in regard to the motive, but he had given the most precise and fitting term to the emotion which kept Hautefeuille awake through the long hours of the night, and which this morning held him motionless before the precious case. It was as though he had not bought it, but had stolen it, so much did he suffer to have it there before his eyes. What was he to do now? Keep it? That had been his instinctive, his passionate desire when he hurried to the merchant. This simple object would make the Baroness Ely so real, so present to him. Keep it? The words he had heard the night before came back to him, and with them all his apprehension. Send it back to her? What could be more certain to make the young woman seek out who it was who had taken such a liberty, and if she did find out?

A prey to these tumultuous thoughts, Pierre turned the golden box in his hands. He spelled out the absurd inscription written in precious stones on the cover of the case: "M.E. moi. 100 C.C.—Aimez-moi sans cesser," the characters said; and the lover thought that this present, bearing such a tender request, must have been given to Madame de Carlsberg by the Archduke or some very dear friend.

What agony he would have felt had the feminine trinket been able to relate its history and all the quarrels that its sentimental device had caused during the liaison of the Baroness Ely with Olivier du Prat. How often Du Prat, too, had tried to discover from whom his mistress had received this present—one of those articles whose unnecessary gaudiness savors of adultery. And he could never draw from the young woman the name of the mysterious person who had given it, of whom Ely had said to Madame Brion, "It was some one who is no longer in this world."

In truth, this suspicious case was not a souvenir of anything very culpable; the Baroness had received it from one of the Counts Kornow. She had had with him one of her earliest flirtations, pushed far enough—as the inscription testified—but interrupted before its consummation by the departure of the young Count for the war in Turkey. He had been killed at Plevna.

Yes, how miserable Hautefeuille would have been if he could have divined the words that had been uttered over this case—words of romantic tenderness from the young Russian, words of outrageous suspicion from his dearest friend, that Olivier whose portrait—what irony!—was on the table before him at this moment. That heart so young, still so intact, so pure, so confiding, was destined to bleed for that which he did not suspect on this morning when, in all his delicacy, he accused no one but himself.

Suddenly a knock on the door made him start in terror. He had been so absorbed in his thoughts that he had not noticed the time, or remembered the rendezvous with his friend. He hid the cigarette case in the table drawer, with all the agitation of a discovered criminal. "Come in," he said in a quivering voice; and the elegant and jovial countenance of Corancez appeared at the door. With that slight accent which neither Paris nor the princely salons of Cannes had been able wholly to correct, the Southerner began:—

"What a country mine is, all the same! What a morning, what air, what sunlight! They are wearing furs up there, and we—" He threw open his light coat. Then, as his eye caught the view, he continued, thinking aloud: "I have never before climbed up to your lighthouse. What a scene! How the long ridge of the Esterel stretches out, and what a sea! A piece of waving satin. This would be divine with a little more space. You are not uncomfortable with only one room?"

"Not in the least," said Hautefeuille; "I have so few things with me—merely a few books."

"That's so," Corancez replied, glancing over the narrow room, which, with the modest case opened on the bureau, had the look of an officer's tent. "You have not the mania for bric-à-brac. If you could see the ridiculously complete dressing-case that I carry around with me, not to speak of a trunk full of knick-knacks. But I have been corrupted by the foreigners. You have remained a true Frenchman. People never realize how simple, sober, and economical the French are. They are too much so in their hate of new inventions. They detest them as much as the English and Americans love them—you, for example. I am sure that it was only by accident you came to this ultra-modern hotel, and that you abominate the luxury and the comfort."

"You call it luxury?" Hautefeuille interrupted, shrugging his shoulders. "But there is truth in what you say. I don't like to complicate my existence."

"I know that prejudice," Corancez replied; "you are for the stairway instead of the lift, for the wood fire instead of the steam heater, for the oil lamp instead of the electric light, for the post instead of the telephone. Those are the ideas of old France. My father had them. But I belong to the new school. Never too many hot and cold water faucets. Never too many telegraph and telephone wires. Never too many machines to save you the slightest movement. They have one fault, however, these new hotels. Their walls are thin as a sheet of paper; and as I have something serious to say to you, and also a great service to ask of you, we will go out, if you are willing. We'll walk to the port, where Marsh will wait for us at half-past ten. Does that suit you? We'll kill time by taking the longest way."

The Provençal had a purpose in proposing the "longest way." He wished to lead his friend past the garden of Madame de Carlsberg.

Corancez was something of a psychologist, and was guided by his instinct with more certainty than he could have been by all the theories of M. Taine on the revival of images. He was certain that the proposition in regard to the plot at Genoa would be accepted by Hautefeuille for the sake of a voyage with the Baroness Ely. The more vividly the image of the young woman was called up to the young man, the more he would be disposed to accept Corancez's proposition.

Thanks to his innocent Machiavelism, the two friends, instead of going straight toward the port, took the road that led to the west of California. They passed a succession of wild ravines, still covered with olives, those beautiful trees whose delicate foliage gives a silver tone to the genuine Provençal landscape. The houses grew more rare and isolated, till at certain places, as in the valley of Urie, one seemed to be a hundred miles from town and shore, so completely did the wooded cliffs hide the sea and the modern city of Cannes.

The misanthropy of the Archduke Henry Francis had led him to build his villa on this very ridge, at whose foot lay that species of park—inevitably inhabited and preserved by the English—through which Corancez conducted Hautefeuille. They came to a point where the Villa Helmholtz suddenly presented itself to their view. It was a heavy construction of two stories, flanked on one side by a vast greenhouse and on the other by a low building with a great chimney emitting a dense smoke. The Southerner pointed to the black column rising into the blue sky and driven by the gentle breeze through the palms of the garden.

"The Archduke is in his laboratory," he said; "I hope that Verdier is making some beautiful discovery to send to the Institute."

"You don't think, then, that he works himself?" asked Pierre.

"Not much," said Corancez. "You know the science of princes and their literature. However, that doesn't matter to me in the least. But what I don't like at all is the way he treats his charming wife—for she is charming, and she has once more proved it to me in a circumstance that I shall tell you about; and you heard what they said last night, that she is surrounded by spies."

"Even at Monte Carlo?" Hautefeuille exclaimed.

"Above all at Monte Carlo," replied Corancez. "And then, it is my opinion that if the Archduke does not love the Baroness he is none the less jealous, furiously jealous, of her, and nothing is more ferocious than jealousy without love. Othello strangled his wife for a handkerchief he had given her, and he adored her. Think of the row the Archduke would make about the cigarette case she sold if it was he who gave it to her."

These remarks, in a tone half serious, half joking, contained a piece of advice which the Southerner wished to give his friend before departing. It was as though he had said in plain language: "Court this pretty woman as much as you like; she is delicious; but beware of the husband." He saw Hautefeuille's expressive face suddenly grow clouded, and congratulated himself on being understood so quickly. How could he have guessed that he had touched an open wound, and that this revelation of the Prince's jealousy had but intensified the pain of remorse in the lover's tender conscience?

Hautefeuille was too proud, too manly, with all his delicacy, to harbor for a moment such calculations as his friend had diplomatically suggested. He was one of those who, when they love, are afflicted by nothing but the suffering of the loved one, and who are always ready to expose themselves to any danger. That which he had seen the night before in the hallucination of his first remorsefulness he saw again, and more clearly, more bitterly,—that possible scene between the Archduke and the Baroness Ely, of which he would be the cause, if the Prince learned of the sale of the case, and the Baroness was unable to recover it.

So he listened distractedly to Corancez's talk, who, however, had had the tact to change the conversation and to relate one of the humorous anecdotes of his repertory. What interest could Pierre have in the stories, more or less true, of the absurdities or scandals of the coast? He did not again pay attention to his companion until, having reached La Croisette, Corancez decided to put the great question. Along this promenade, more crowded than usual, a person was approaching who would furnish the Southerner with the best pretext for beginning his confidence; and, suddenly taking the arm of the dreamer to arouse him from his reveries, Corancez whispered:—

"I told you a moment ago that Madame de Carlsberg had of late been particularly good to me, and I told you, as we left the hotel, that I had a service to ask of you, a great service. You do not perceive the connection between these two circumstances? You will soon understand the enigma. Do you see who is coming toward us?"

"I see the Count Navagero," Hautefeuille answered, "with his two dogs and a friend whom I do not know. That is all."

"It is the whole secret of the enigma. But wait till they pass. He is with Lord Herbert Bohun. He will not deign to speak to us."

The Venetian moved toward them, more English in appearance than the Englishman by his side. This child of the Adriatic had succeeded in realizing the type of the Cowes or Scarborough "masher," and with such perfection that he escaped the danger of becoming a caricature. Clothed in a London suit of that cloth which the Scotch call "harris" from its place of origin, and which has a vague smell of peat about it, his trousers turned up according to the London manner, although not a drop of rain had fallen for a week, he was walking with long, stiff strides, one hand grasping his cane by the middle, the other hand holding his gloves.

His face was smoothly shaven; he wore a cap of the same cloth as that of his coat, and smoked a briarwood pipe of the shape used at Oxford. Two small, hairy Skye terriers trotted behind him, their stubby legs supporting a body three times as long as it was high. From what tennis match was he returning? To what game of golf was he on his way? His red hair, of that color so frequent in the paintings of Bonifazio, an inheritance from the doges, his ancestors, added the finishing touch to his incredible resemblance to Lord Herbert.

There was, however, one difference between them. As they passed Corancez and Hautefeuille, the twins uttered a good morning—Bohun's entirely without accent, while the syllables of the Venetian were emphasized in a manner excessively Britannic.

"You have observed that man," Corancez continued, when they had passed beyond earshot, "and you take him for an Anglomaniac of the most ridiculous kind. But, when you scratch his English exterior, what do you suppose you find beneath it? An Italian of the time of Machiavelli, as unscrupulous as though he were living at the court of the Borgias. He would poison us all, you, me, any one who crossed his path. I have read it in his hand, but don't be uneasy; he has not yet put his principles into practice, only he has tortured for six years a poor, defenceless woman, the adorable Madame Bonnacorsi, his sister. I do not attempt to explain it. But for six years he has so terrorized over this woman that she has not taken a step without his knowing of it, has not had a servant that he has not chosen, has not received a letter without having to account for it to him. It is one of those domestic tyrannies which you would not believe possible unless you had read of them in the newspaper reports, or actually witnessed it as I have. He does not wish her to remarry, because he lives on her great fortune. That is the point."

"How infamous!" Hautefeuille exclaimed. "But are you sure?"

"As sure as I am that I see Marsh's boat," replied Corancez, pointing to the trim yacht at anchor in the bay. And he continued lightly, in a tone that was sentimental and yet manly, not without a certain grace: "And what I am going to ask you is to help me circumvent this pretty gentleman. We Provençaux have always a Quixotic side to our character. We have a mania for adventurous undertakings; it is the sun that puts that in our blood. If Madame Bonnacorsi had been happy and free, doubtless I should not have paid much attention to her. But when I learned that she was unhappy, and was being miserably abused, I fell wildly in love with her. How I came to let her know of this and to find that she loved me I will tell you some other day. If Navagero is from Venice, I am from Barbentane. It is a little further from the sea, but we understand navigation. At any rate, I am going to marry Madame Bonnacorsi, and I am going to ask you to be my groomsman."

"You are going to marry Madame Bonnacorsi?" repeated Hautefeuille, too astonished to answer his friend's request. "But the brother?"

"Oh! he knows nothing about it," Corancez replied. "But that is just where the good fairy came into the story in the form of the charming Baroness Ely. Without her, Andryana—permit me thus to call my fiancée—would never have brought herself to say 'yes.' She loved me, and yet she was afraid. Do not misjudge her. These tender, sensitive women have strange timidities, which are difficult to understand. She was afraid, but chiefly for me. She feared a quarrel between her brother and me—hot words, a duel. Then I proposed and persuaded her to accept the most romantic and unusual expedient,—a secret marriage. On the 14th of next month, God willing, a Venetian priest, in whom she has confidence, will marry us in the chapel of a palace at Genoa. In the meantime I shall disappear. I am supposed to be at Barbentane among my vineyards. And on the 13th, while Navagero is playing the Englishman on Lord Herbert Bohun's yacht, with the Prince of Wales and other royal personages, Marsh's boat, to which you will be invited, will sail away with a number of passengers, among whom will be the woman I love the most in the world, and to whom I shall devote my life, and the friend I most esteem, if he does not refuse my request. What does he answer?"

"He answers," said Hautefeuille, "that if ever he was astonished in his life, he is so now. You, Corancez, in love, and so much in love that you will sacrifice your liberty. You have always seemed so careless, so indifferent. And a secret marriage. But it will not remain a secret twenty-four hours. I know your exuberance. You always tell everything you know to everybody. But I thank you for the friendship you have shown me, and I will be your groomsman."

As he said these last words he shook Corancez's hand with that simple seriousness which he showed for everything. His companion had touched him deeply. Doubtless this simplicity and candid trustfulness embarrassed the Southerner. He was very willing to profit from them, but he felt a little ashamed at abusing too much this loyal nature, whose charm he also felt, and he mingled with his thanks a confession such as he had never before made to any one.

"Don't think me so exuberant. The sun always has that effect. But, in truth, we men of the South never say what we mean.—Here we are. Remember," he said, with his finger on his lips, "Miss Marsh knows all, Marsh knows nothing."

"One word more," Hautefeuille replied; "I have promised to be your groomsman. But you will permit me to go to Genoa another way? I don't know these people well enough to accept an invitation of that kind."

"I trust to Flossie Marsh to overcome your scruples," said Corancez, unable to repress a smile. "You will be one of the passengers on the Jenny. Do you know why this boat is called the Jenny? Only an Anglo-Saxon would permit himself seriously such a play upon words. You have heard of Jenny Lind, the singer? Well, the reason the facetious Marsh gave this pretty name to his floating villa was because she keeps the high seas. And every time he explains this he is so amazed at his wit that he fairly chokes with laughter.—But what a delicious day."

The elegant lines of the Jenny's rigging and white hull could now be seen close at hand. She seemed the young, coquettish queen of the little port, amid the fishing boats, yawls, and coasters that swarmed about the quay. A group of sailors on the stone curb sang while they mended their nets. On the ground-floor of the houses were offices of ship companies, or shops, stored with provisions and tackle. The working population, totally absent from this city of leisure, is concentrated upon the narrow margin of the port, and gives it that popular picturesqueness so refreshing in contrast with the uniform banality imprinted on the South by its wealthy visitors. It was doubtless an unconscious sense of that contrast that led the plebeian Marsh to choose this point of the roadstead.

This self-made man who also had labored on the quays at Cleveland, by the shores of Lake Erie, whose waters are more stormy than the Mediterranean, despised at heart the vain and vapid society in which he lived. He lived in it, however, because the cosmopolitan aristocracy was still another world to conquer.

When he regaled some grand duke or prince regent on board his yacht, what voluptuous pride he might feel on looking at these fishermen of his own age, and saying to himself, while he smoked his cigar with the royal or imperial highness: "Thirty years ago these fishermen and I were equals. I was working just as they are. And now?" As Hautefeuille and Corancez did not figure on any page of the Almanach de Gotha, the master of the yacht did not consider it necessary to await his visitors on deck; and when the young men arrived they found no one but Miss Flossie Marsh, seated on a camp-stool before an easel, sketching in water colors. Minutely, patiently, she copied the landscape before her,—the far-off group of islands melting together like a long, dark carapace fixed on the blue bay, the hollow and supple line of the gulf, with the succession of houses among the trees, and, above all, the water of such an intense azure, dotted with white sails, and over all that other azure of the sky, clear, transparent, luminous. The industrious hand of the young girl copied this scene in forms and colors whose exactitude and hardness revealed a very small talent at the service of a very strong will.

"These American women are astonishing," whispered Corancez to Hautefeuille. "Eighteen months ago she had never touched a brush. She began to work and she has made herself an artist, as she will make herself a savante if she marries Verdier. They construct talents in their minds as their dentists build gold teeth in your mouth.—She sees us."

"My uncle is busy at present," said the young girl, after giving them a vigorous handshake. "I tell him he should call the boat his office. As soon as we reach a port his telephone is connected with the telegraph station, and the cable begins to communicate with Marionville. Let us say good morning to him, and then I will show you the yacht. It is pretty enough, but an old model; it is at least ten years old. Mr. Marsh is having one built at Glasgow that will beat this one and a good many others. It is to measure four thousand tons. The Jenny is only eighteen hundred. But here is my uncle."

Miss Florence had led the young men across the deck of the boat, with its planking as clean, its brass-work as polished, its padded furniture, of brown straw, as fresh, its Oriental rugs as precious as though this flooring, this metal, these armchairs, these carpets belonged to one of the villas on the coast, instead of to this yacht which had been tossed on all the waves of the Atlantic and Pacific. And the room into which the young girl introduced them could not have presented a different aspect had it been situated in Marionville on the fifth story of one of those colossal buildings which line the streets with their vast cliffs of iron and brick. Three secretaries were seated at their desks. One of them was copying letters on a typewriter, another was telephoning a despatch, the third was writing in shorthand at the dictation of the little, thick-set, gray-faced man whom Corancez had shown to Hautefeuille at the table of trente-et-quarante. This king of Ohio paused to greet his visitors:—

"Impossible to accompany you, gentlemen," he said. "While you are taking your promenade," he added, with that air of tranquil defiance by which the true Yankee manifests his contempt for the Old World, "we shall prepare a pretty voyage for you. But you Frenchmen are so contented at home that you never go anywhere. Do you know the Lake Region? Wait, here is the map. We have there, just on these four lakes—Superior, Michigan, Huron, and Erie—sixty thousand ships, amounting to thirty-two million tons, which transport every year three thousand five hundred million tons of merchandise. The problem is to put this fleet and the cities on the lakes—Duluth, Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, Marionville—in communication with Europe. The lakes empty into the ocean through the St. Lawrence. That is the road to follow. Unfortunately we have a little obstacle to overcome at the outlet of Lake Erie, an obstacle once and a half as high as the Arc de l'Etoile at Paris. I mean Niagara, and also the rapids at the outlet of Lake Ontario. They have made seven or eight canals, with locks which permit the passage of little boats. But we wish a free passage for any transatlantic vessel. This gentleman is about to conclude the affair," and Marsh pointed to the secretary at the telephone. "Our capital has been completed this morning—two hundred million dollars. In two years I shall sail home in the Jenny without once disembarking. I wish Marionville to become the Liverpool of the lakes. It has already a hundred thousand inhabitants. In two years we shall have a hundred and fifty thousand; that is equal to your Toulouse. In ten years, two hundred and fifty thousand—that is equal to your Bordeaux—and in twenty years we shall reach the five hundred and seventeen thousand of old Liverpool. We are a young people, and everything young should begin by progressing. You will excuse me for a few minutes, gentlemen?"

And the indefatigable worker had re-commenced his dictation before his niece had led from the room these degenerate children of slow Europe.

"Is he enough of an American for you?" Corancez whispered to Hautefeuille. "He knows it too well, and he acts his own rôle to the point of caricature. All their race appears in that." Then aloud: "You know, Miss Flossie, we can talk freely of our plan before Pierre. He consents to be my groomsman."

"Ah! how delightful!" the young girl cried; then added gayly: "I had no doubt you would accept. My uncle has asked me to invite you to join our little voyage to Genoa. You will come, then. That will be perfectly delicious. You will be rewarded for your kindness. You will have on board your flirt, Madame de Carlsberg."

As she said this the laughing girl looked the young man in the face. She had spoken without malice, with that simple directness upon which Corancez had justly counted.

The people of the Hew World have this frankness, which we take for brutality; it results from their profound and total acceptation of facts. Flossie Marsh knew that the presence of Baroness Ely on the yacht would be agreeable to Hautefeuille. Innocent American girl as she was, she did not imagine for a moment that the relations between this young man and a married woman could exceed the limits of a harmless flirtation or a permissible sentimentality. So it had seemed to her as natural to hazard this allusion to Pierre's sentiments as it would have been to hear an allusion to her own sentiments for Marcel Verdier. Thus it was strangely painful for her to see by the sudden pallor of the young man and the trembling of his lips that she had wounded him. And her face grew very red.

If the Americans in their simplicity are at times wanting in tact, they are sensitive to the highest degree; and these faults of tact which they commit so easily are a real affliction to them. But that blush only aggravated the painful surprise which Hautefeuille had felt at hearing Madame de Carlsberg thus spoken of. By an inevitable and overwhelming association of ideas he recalled Corancez's words, "I am sure that Miss Marsh will overcome your scruples," and the smile with which he said this. The look Madame Bonnacorsi had given him in the train the night before returned to his memory. By an intuition, unreasoned yet irrefutable, he perceived that the secret of his passion, hidden so profoundly in his heart, had been discovered by these three persons.

He quivered in every nerve with shame, revulsion, and distress; his heart palpitated so violently that he could scarcely breathe. The martyrdom of having to speak at this painful moment was spared him, thanks to Corancez, who saw clearly enough the effect produced upon his friend by the imprudence of the American girl, and, assuming the rôle of host, he began:—

"What do you think, Hautefeuille, of this salon and this smoking-room? Isn't it well arranged? This trimming of light, varnished wood—what neat and virile elegance! And this dining-room? And these cabins? One could spend months, years in them. You see, each one with its separate toilet-room."

And he led on his companion and the young girl herself. He remembered everything, with that astonishing memory for objects possessed by natures like his, created for action, adapted to realities; with his habitual self-assurance, he commented upon everything, from the pikes and guns on the middle deck, awaiting the pirates of the South Seas, to the machinery for filling and emptying the baths, and suddenly he asked Miss Marsh this question, singular enough in a passage of that colossal and luxurious toy which seemed to sum up the grand total of all inventions for the refinement of life:—

"Miss Flossie, may we see the death chamber?"

"If it would interest M. Hautefeuille," said Florence Marsh, who had not ceased to regret her thoughtless remark. "My uncle had an only daughter," she continued, "who was named Marion, after my poor aunt. You know that Mr. Marsh, who lost his wife when he was very young, named his town after her, Marionville. My cousin died four years ago. My uncle was almost insane with grief. He wished nothing to be altered in the room she occupied on the yacht. He put her statue in it, and she has always around her the flowers she loved in life. Wait, look, but do not go in."

She opened the door, and the young men saw, by the light of two blue-shaded lamps, a room all draped in faded pink. It was filled with a profusion of small objects such as might be possessed by a spoiled child of a railroad magnate—a toilet case of silver and gold, jewels in glass boxes, portraits in carved frames—and in the centre, on a real bed of inlaid wood, lay the statue of the dead girl, white, with closed eyelids, the lips slightly parted, among sheaves of carnations and of orchids. The silence of this strange shrine, the mystery, the delicate perfume of the flowers, the unlooked-for poetry of this posthumous idolatry, in the boat of a yachtsman and a man of business, would, in any other circumstances, have appealed to the romanticism innate in Pierre Hautefeuille's heart. But during all this visit he had had but one thought,—to escape from Miss Marsh and Corancez, to be alone in order to reflect upon the evidence, so painfully unexpected, that his deepest secret had been discovered. So it was a relief to depart from the boat, and still a torture to have the company of his friend a few minutes longer.

"Did you notice," said Corancez, "how much the dead girl resembles Madame de Chésy? No? Well, when you meet her some time with Marsh, be sure to observe her. The canal by the Great Lakes, his railroad, the buildings of Marionville, his mines, his boat—he forgets them all. He thinks of his dead daughter. If little Madame de Chésy should ask him for the Kohinoor, he would set out to find it, for the mere sake of this resemblance. Isn't it singular, such a sentimental trait in a rogue of his stamp? His character ought to please you. If you are interested in him, you will be able to study him at your leisure on the 13th, 14th, and 15th. And let me thank you again for what you are going to do for me. If you have anything to communicate to me, my address is Genoa, poste restante. And now I must return to look after the packing. Will you let me take you part of the way? I see the old coachman whom I told to come here at eleven."

Corancez hailed an empty cab which was passing, drawn by two small Corsican ponies, who saluted the young man with a wink, his "Good day, Monsieur Marius" revealing the familiarity of long conversations between these two Provençaux. Pascal Espérandien, otherwise known as the Old Man, was an alert little personage and very crafty, the pride of whose life was to make his two rats trot faster than the Russian horses of the grand dukes residing at Cannes. He harnessed them, trimmed them, ornamented them so fantastically that they drew from all Miss Marsh's compatriots, from Antibes to Napoule, the same exclamations of "How lovely, how enchanting, how fascinating!" that they would have uttered before a Raphael or a Worth dress, a polo match or a noted gymnast. Doubtless the wily old man, with his shrewd smile, possessed diplomatic talents which might make him useful in a secret intrigue, for the prudent Corancez never took any other carriage, especially when he had, as on this morning, a rendezvous with the Marquise Andryana. He was to see her for five minutes in the garden of a hotel where she had a call to make. Her carriage was to stand before one of the doors, the Old Man's equipage before another. So nothing could have been more agreeable than Pierre's response to this clandestine fiancé.

"Thanks, but I prefer to walk."

"Then good-by," said Corancez, getting into the cab. And, parodying a celebrated verse, "To meet soon again, Seigneur, where you know, with whom you know, for what you know?"

The cab turned the corner of the Rue d'Antibes, and departed with furious speed. Hautefeuille was at last alone. He could filially face the idea which had been formulating itself in his thoughts with terrible precision ever since Miss Florence Marsh had spoken these simple words, "Your flirt, Madame de Carlsberg."

"They all three know that I love her—the Marquise, Corancez, and Miss Marsh. The look I caught from one of them last night, the remark and the smile of the other, and what the third one said, and her blush at having thought aloud—these are not dreams. They know I love her—But then, Corancez, last night, when he led me to the gambling-table, must have divined my thoughts. Such dissimulation!—is it possible? But why not? He acknowledged it himself awhile ago. To have concealed his sentiments for Madame Bonnacorsi, he must know how to keep a secret. He kept his and I have not kept mine. Who knows but they all three saw me buy the cigarette case? But no. They could not have had the cruelty to speak of it and to let it be spoken of before me. Marius is not malicious, neither is the Marquise, nor Miss Marsh. They know—that is all—they know. But how did they find out?"

Yes, how? With a lover of his susceptibility such a question would of necessity result in one of those self-examinations in which the scruples of conscience develop all their feverish illusions. On the way back to California and at the table where his luncheon was served to him apart, and afterward on a solitary walk to the picturesque village of Mougins, his life during these last few weeks came back to him, day by day, hour by hour, with a displacement of perspective which presented all the simple incidents of his naïve idyl as irreparable faults, crowned by that last fault, the purchase of the gold box in a public place and in full view of such people.

He recalled his first meeting with Madame de Carlsberg, in the Villa Chésy. How the peculiar beauty of the young woman and her strange charm had captivated him from the start, and how he had permitted himself to gaze upon her unrestrainedly, not dreaming that he was thus attracting attention and causing remarks! He remembered how often he had gone to her house, seizing every opportunity of meeting her and talking with her. The indiscretion of such assiduity could not have passed unperceived, any more than his continued presence at places where he had never gone before.

He saw again the golf field on those mornings when the Baroness Ely seemed so beautiful, in her piquant dress of the bright club colors—red and white. He saw himself at the balls, waiting in a corner of the room until she entered with that enchantment which emanated from every fold of her gown. He remembered how often at the confectioner's, or La Croisette, he had approached her, and how she had always invited him to sit at her table with such grace in her welcome. Each of these memories recalled her amiability, her delicate indulgence.

The memory of that charm, to which he yielded himself so completely, augmented his self-reproach. He recalled his imprudent actions, so natural when one does not feel one's self to be observed, but which appear to be such faults as soon as one is conscious of suspicion. For example, during the ten days on which the Baroness was absent from Cannes he had not once returned to those places where he had gone simply for the sake of seeing her. No one had met him at the golf field, nor at any evening party, nor at any five o'clock tea. He had not even made a call. Could this coincidence of his retirement with the absence of the Baroness have failed to be remarked? What had been said about it? Since his love had drawn him into this agitated world of pleasure he had often been pained by the light words thrown out at hazard at the women of this society, when they were not present. Had he been simply an object of ridicule, or had they taken advantage of his conduct to calumniate the woman he loved with a love so unhappy, ravaged by all the chimeras of remorse?

The words used by Florence Marsh—"your flirt"—gave a solid basis to these hypotheses. He had always despised the things which this word implied,—that shameful familiarity of a woman with a man, that dangling of her beauty before his desire, all the vulgarity and indiscretion which this equivocal relationship suggests. Could they think that he had such relations with Madame de Carlsberg? Had this evil interpretation been put upon his impulsiveness? Then he thought of the sorrows which he divined in the life of this unique woman, of the espionage that was spoken of, and again the hall at Monte Carlo appeared to him, and he could not understand why he had not realized the prodigious indelicacy of his action. He felt it now with most pitiful acuteness.

Haunted by these thoughts he prolonged his walk for hours and hours, and when in the twilight, suddenly grown dark and cold, as it happens in the South after days most soft and blue, as he entered the door of his hotel, the concierge handed him a letter on which he recognized the writing of Baroness Ely, his hands trembled as he tore open the envelope, sealed with the imprint of an antique stone—the head of Medusa. And if the head of this pagan legend had appeared alive before him he would not have been more overwhelmed than he was by the simple words of this note:—

"DEAR SIR—I have returned to Cannes and I should be happy if you could come to-morrow, at about half-past one, to the Villa Helmholtz. I wish to talk with you upon a serious matter. That is why I set this hour, at which I am most certain of not being interrupted."

And she signed herself, not as in her last letters with her full name, but as in the first she had written him—Baroness de Sallach Carlsberg. Hautefeuille read and re-read these cold, dry lines. It was evident that the young woman had learned of his purchase at Monte Carlo, and all the agony of his remorse revealed itself in these words, which he cried aloud as he entered his room:—

"She knows! I am lost!"

CHAPTER IV
LOVERS' RESOLUTIONS

The note which had thus brought Pierre's anxiety to its extreme represented the first act in a plan invented by Madame Brion to put an immediate and irreparable end to a sentiment for which her friendly insight had led her to predict frightful suffering, a possible tragedy, a certain catastrophe. After Madame de Carlsberg's sudden and passionate confidences, she had said to herself that if she did not succeed in immediately separating these two beings, drawn to each other by such an instinctive attraction, the young man would not be slow to discover the sentiment he inspired in the woman he loved. It was only thanks to his remarkable ingenuousness and candor that he had not already discovered it.

When he knew the truth, what would happen? Ingenuous and candid though she was herself, Louise Brion could not evade the true answer to this question. As soon as an understanding took place between Hautefeuille and Ely, she would go to the end of her desire. She had too clearly revealed in her confession the indomitable audacity of her character, her need of complying with the demands of her passions. She would become the young man's mistress. Although the conversation of the night before had imposed upon Louise the evidence of faults already committed by her friend, neither her mind nor her heart could entertain the thought of these faults. The mere idea of this liaison filled her with a shudder of fright, almost of horror. All through the night she had tried to think of some way to obtain the only escape she could see for Ely, the voluntary departure of Hautefeuille.

Her first thought was to appeal to his delicacy. The portrait Madame de Carlsberg had drawn of him, his interesting face, his frank and honest look, the naïveté of his amorous action in buying the gold box, all revealed an exquisite fineness of nature. If she should write him, bravely, simply, an unsigned letter, speaking of that action, of that purchase which might have been, and no doubt had been, seen by others too? If on this account she should beg him to leave in order to save Madame de Carlsberg from trouble? During her long and feverish insomnia she had tried to formulate this letter, without discovering expressions which satisfied her.

It was so difficult to make such a request without letting it signify, "Go, because she loves you!"

Then in the morning, when she had wakened from the tardy sleep that ended this night of agony, a chance accident, commonplace enough, but in which her piety saw something providential, gave her an unexpected excuse for pleading, not with the young man at a distance, but with Madame de Carlsberg herself and at once. While reading distractedly in bed one of those newspapers of the Riviera, journals of international snobbism which communicate information concerning all these arrant aristocrats, she discovered the arrival at Cairo, of M. Olivier du Prat, secretary of the Embassy, and his wife; and she rose at once to show Ely these two lines of mundane news, so insignificant, yet so full of menace for her.

"If they are at Cairo," she said to the Baroness, "it means that their Nile trip is over, and that they think of returning. What is the natural route for them? From Alexandria to Marseilles. And if he is so near his friend, this man will wish to see him."

"It is true," said Ely, her heart beating wildly as she read the letters of that name, Olivier du Prat.

"It is true," she repeated. "They will meet again. Was I not right last night?"

"See," cried Louise Brion, "what it would have been if you had not had thus far the strength to fight against your sentiment. See what it will be if you do not put an end to it forever."

And she continued describing with all the eloquence of her passionate friendship a plan of conduct which suddenly occurred to her as the wisest and most effectual.

"You must take this opportunity which is offered to you. You will never have a better one. You must have the young man come, and speak to him yourself about the purchase he made last night. Tell him that others have seen it; show him your astonishment at his indiscretion; tell him that his assiduity has been noticed. For the sake of your welfare and your reputation command him to go away. A little firmness for a few minutes and it will all be done. He is not what you paint him, what I feel him to be, if he does not obey your request. Ah! believe me, the one way to love him is to save him from this tragedy, which is not simply a far-off possibility, but an immediate and inevitable danger."

Ely listened, but made no reply. Worn out by the terrible emotion of her confidence on the previous night, she had no strength left to resist the tender suggestions which appealed to her love itself, to struggle against her love. There is, in fact, in these complete passions an instinctive and violent desire for extreme resolutions. When these sentiments cannot find satisfaction in perfect happiness, they obtain a kind of grateful relief in their absolute frustration. Filling our soul to the exclusion of all else, they bear it incessantly to one or the other of the two poles, ecstasy and despair, without resting for a moment between them. Having come to this stage of her passion, it followed of necessity, as Louise Brion had clearly seen, that the Baroness Ely should either become the young man's mistress, or that she should put between herself and him the insurmountable barrier of a separation before the liaison—secret romance of so many women, both virtuous and otherwise. Yes! how many women have thus, in a delirium of renouncement, dug an abyss between them and a secretly idolized being, who never suspects this idolatry or this immolation. To the innocent ones, the anticipation of the remorse which would follow their fault gives the requisite energy; the others, the culpable, feel, as Madame de Carlsberg felt so strongly, the inability to efface the past, and they prefer the exalted martyrdom of sacrifice to the intolerable bitterness of a joy forever poisoned by the atrocious jealousy of that indestructible past.

Another influence aided in overcoming the young woman's spirit of revolt. Stranger as she was to all religious faith, she did not, like her pious friend, attach anything providential to this commonplace accident,—a newspaper account of a diplomatist's voyage,—but had acquired, through her very incredulity, that unconscious fatalism which is the last superstition of the sceptic. The sight of these fine printed syllables, "Olivier du Prat," a few hours after the night's conversation, had filled her with that feeling of presentiment, harder to brave than real danger for certain natures, like hers, made up of decision and action.

"You are right," she answered, in the broken accent of an irremediable renunciation, "I will see him, I will speak to him, and all will be finished forever."

It was with this resolution, made in truth with the fullest strength of her heart, that she arrived at Cannes on the afternoon of the same day, accompanied by Madame Brion, who did not wish to leave her; and, as soon as she arrived, she had, almost under the dictation of her faithful friend, written and despatched the letter which overwhelmed Hautefeuille. She truly believed herself to be sincere in her resolution to separate from him, and yet if she had been able to read to the bottom of her heart, she might have seen, from a very trifling act, how fragile this resolution was, and how much she was possessed by thoughts of love. No sooner had she written to him from whom she wished to separate forever than, at the same place, and with the same ink, she wrote two letters to two persons of her acquaintance, in whose love-affairs she was the confidante, and to some extent the accomplice,—Miss Florence Marsh and the Marquise Andryana Bonnacorsi.

She invited them to lunch with her on the morrow, thus obeying a profound instinct which impels a woman who loves and suffers to seek the company of women who are also in love, with whom she may talk of sentimental things, of the happiness which warms them, who will pity her sorrow, if she tells them of it, who will understand her and whom she will understand. Usually, as she had said the night before, the hesitation of the sentimental and timid Italian woman fatigued her, and in the passion of the American girl for the Archduke's assistant, there was an element of deliberate positivism, which jarred upon her native impulsiveness. But the young widow and the young girl were two women in love, and that sufficed, in this season of melancholy, to make it delightful, almost necessary, to see them. She little thought that this impulsive and natural invitation would provoke a violent scene with her husband, or that a conjugal conflict would arise from it, whose final episode was to have a tragic influence upon the issue of that growing passion, which her reason had sworn to renounce.

Having arrived at Cannes at three o'clock in the afternoon, she had not seen him during the rest of the day. She knew that he had been with Marcel Verdier in the laboratory, nor was she surprised to see him appear at the dinner hour, accompanied by his aide-de-camp, Comte von Laubach, the professional spy of His Highness, without a sign of interest in her health, without a question as to how she had spent the past ten days.

The Prince had been in his youth one of the bravest and most handsome of the incomparable cavaliers of his country, and the old soldier was recognizable in the figure of this scientific maniac, which had remained slender in spite of the fact that he was approaching his sixtieth year, in the tone of command which his slightest accents retained, in his martial face, scarred by a sabre at Sadowa, in his long mustache of grizzly red. But what one never forgot after seeing the singular man was his eyes—eyes of an intense blue, very bright and almost savagely restless, under the pale, reddish brows of formidable thickness. The Archduke had the eccentric habit of always wearing, even with his evening dress, heavy laced shoes, which permitted him, as soon as the dinner was over, to go out on foot, accompanied sometimes by his aide-de-camp, sometimes by Verdier, for an endless nocturnal walk. He prolonged them at times till three o'clock in the morning, having no other means of gaining a little sleep for his morbid nerves. This extreme nervousness was betrayed by his delicate hands, burned with acids and deformed by tools of the laboratory, whose fingers twitched incessantly in uncontrollable movements.

From all his actions could be divined the dominant trait of his character, a moral infirmity for which there is no precise term, the inability to continue any sensation or to persist in any effort of the will. That was the secret of the singular uneasiness which this man, so distinguished in certain ways, imparted to those around him, and from which he was the first to suffer. One felt that in the hands of this strangely irritable person every enterprise would fail, and that a kind of inward and irresistible frenzy prevented him from putting himself in harmony with any environment, any circumstance, any necessity. This superior nature was incapable of submission to facts.

Perhaps the secret of his unbalanced condition lay in the fixed idea that he had been at one time so near the throne and had lost it forever, that he had seen irreparable faults committed in politics and in war, that he had known of them while they were taking place and had not been able to prevent them.